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EVERY-DAY RELIGION 



EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


BY 

EDWARD S. WOODS, M.A., Hon. C.F. 

N* 

AUTHOR OF 

** MODERN DISCIPLESHIP,” “ KNIGHTS IN ARMOUR,” ETC. 


NEW YORK 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Made and Printed in Great Britain. 
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, 
Printers, Bungay, Suffolk. 


3a3-T'2-s 

iW 


TO 

MY DEAREST AND BEST 

WHO IN THE INTIMACIES OF FAMILY LIFE 
HAVE HELPED ME TO UNDERSTAND 
THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF 
“EVERY-DAY” RELIGION 



PREFACE 


Eleven years ago I wrote a book called Modern 
Discipleship (of which a new and revised edition will 
be ready shortly), in which an attempt was made to 
set forth, quite simply, some of the meanings of 
Christian discipleship to-day, with special emphasis 
on the “ inner life.” Ever since then I have cherished 
the hope of writing a sequel, which should, so to say, 
start from the other end and deal with some of the 
practical implications of Christian discipleship in the 
field of common work-a-day life. Such a sequel is 
attempted in this present volume. It has naturally 
been impossible to cover all the ground, and I am 
aware of sad inadequacy in the treatment of those 
subjects which have been selected for inclusion; 
nevertheless I send the book forth in the hope that 
it may inspire some who read it with a fresh convic¬ 
tion that the only possible solution of all our diffi¬ 
culties, as a society and as individuals, is to be found 
in Jesus Christ, and with a new determination to 
explore personally and adventurously the way of 
living which He has opened up for mankind. 

Some of the chapters were written in the peace 
of holiday time ; but most of them were penned in 
places, and under conditions, very far from holiday 
vii 


PREFACE 


viii 


quiet, such as trains and station waiting-rooms, in 
the odd half-hours of a busy life. Perhaps such 
variation in the circumstances of the actual writing 
is not inappropriate to a book which seeks to bridge 
the gulf between the cloister and the market-place. 

The gist of Chapter IV was given as an address 
at a Communicants’ Convention in preparation for 
the Westminster Mission (1922), and appears in the 
published report of the Proceedings of that Conven¬ 
tion. Portions of Chapters VI, XII, and XIII, 
recast and amplified, will be found included in a 
series of essays on Liberal Evangelicalism to be 
published shortly. 

Grateful acknowledgment is made of permission 
to make use of copyright material from Messrs. 
Blackwood & Sons for the quotation from 
Stradivarius; Messrs. Macmillan for the poem by 
Mr. Blackwood; the executors of the late George 
Macdonald; and to Miss Evelyn Underhill. 

To those friends who have helped in the writing 
of this book by their encouragement, counsel and 
prayer (two of whom have also, in their goodness, 
shared in the labour of proof-reading), I would 
tender a gratitude which cannot be adequately ex¬ 
pressed in words. If this book should under God 
contribute anything, however small, to the building 
of His Kingdom, they will, I know, find in that fact 
the recompense that they would wish. 


Cambridge , 
October 1922. 


Edward S. Woods. 


4t Teach me, my God and King, 

In all things Thee to see ; 

And what I do in anything 
To do it as for Thee. 

A man that looks on glass, 

On it may stay his eye ; 

Or if he pleaseth, through it pass, 

And then the heaven espy. 

All may of Thee partake ; 

Nothing can be so mean, 

Which with this tincture, ‘for Thy sake/ 
Will not grow bright and clean. 

A servant with this clause 
Makes drudgery divine ; 

Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, 
Makes that and the action fine. 

This is the famous stone 
That turneth all to gold ; 

For that which God doth touch and own 
Cannot for less be told.” 


George Herbert. 



CONTENTS 


CHAP. 

I. 

Christianity a Way of Living 

• 

PAGE 

I 

II. 

The Problem of Living Together 
i . In the World 


19 

III. 

The Problem of Living Together 

2. Within the Nation 

• 

43 

IV. 

Sharing Life . 


65 

V. 

Christianity and Work . 


85 

VI. 

Christianity and Recreation . 


I0 5 

VII. 

Christianity and Money 


123 

VIII. 

Christianity and Sex 


139 

IX. 

Christianity and Health 


155 

X. 

Christianity and Beauty • 


*75 

XI. 

Christianity and Thought 


J 93 

XII. 

The Root of the Matter 


211 

XIII. 

Doing it Together .... 

• 

229 


xi 









CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTORY: CHRISTIANITY A WAY OF LIVING 


3 


" Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into 
the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of My Father 
which is in heaven."— St. Matthew vii. 21. 

" Whatsoever ye do, in word or in deed, do all in the name of 
the Lord Jesus .”—Colossians iii. 17. 

"It is the glory of religion not to be set apart from life, but to 
permeate it powerfully."—H. G. King. 

“ Christianity is the projection into the world of the lines along 
which Christ lived. It is a duplicating in modern life of the spirit, 
the method, and the aims of Jesus, a following through the world 
the very footprints that He left behind."— Henry Drummond. 

" The long history of European Christianity, if it ever comes to 
be written, will be the history of a submerged and hidden move¬ 
ment—the tracing of the course of a pure but tenuous stream of 
living water which has refreshed the souls of innumerable men 
and women who have penetrated to its secret recesses, but has 
but seldom emerged into the open, to flow through the broad and 
dusty cities where the world's main activities are carried on."— 
A. E. Zimmern. 

" Grant us the will to fashion as we feel. 

Grant us the strength to labour as we know, 

Grant us the purpose, ribb'd and edged with steel. 

To strike the blow. 

Knowledge we ask not—knowledge Thou hast lent. 

But, Lord, the will—there lies our bitter need; 

Give me to build above the deep intent 
The deed, the deed." 

John Drinkwater. 

" Faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but life in scorn of 
consequence."—A non. 


CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTORY : CHRISTIANITY A WAY OF LIVING 

At a little town in Belgium, some weeks after the 
Armistice, I happened to be present at a gathering 
of officers who had come together to listen to an 
address by a distinguished Army Chaplain. Some 
seventy turned up, and the Chaplain accomplished 
what seemed to me the remarkable feat of holding 
them spellbound for more than an hour while he 
expounded Christianity in his own vigorous, pic¬ 
turesque and inimitable style. Among other things 
he spoke of the evolution of the Padre during the 
war, and the significance of that evolution. In the 
early days, he said, at Mons and Ypres and elsewhere, 
the Padre’s presence at the front had always occa¬ 
sioned a certain surprise; men in the combatant 
units could not quite make out what he was doing 
there, unless it were to bury the dead. Only 
gradually did it dawn on men’s minds that a parson’s 
work has to do quite as much with living as with 
dying. 

That unthinking conception of the Padre as a 
sort of glorified undertaker illustrates a fact of our 
day which should be well pondered, the fact that 
religion “ has fallen into a rut of irrelevance to 
3 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


life.” And perhaps the chief task for the Christians 
of our generation is to get their religion back again 
from life’s circumference to its centre, to experience 
and to demonstrate its entire relevance to all the 
concerns and activities of human beings. The task 
can never be an easy one, for just as the Churches 
are prone to imprison the Christ in creeds and 
stained-glass windows, so there is in every man 
who is at all religious a queer instinct to rail off a 
department of his life and call it religion. Within 
that circle are dumped all manner of things which 
are supposed to belong there : church-going, pious 
reading, meetings, missions, parsons, charities, and 
the general paraphernalia of organized religion. But 
all the while the real business of life is carried on 
on the other side of the fence. All the thousand 
details of engrossing daily work, all the personal 
relationships involved, all that goes on in the world 
around, life’s interests and pleasures and recreations, 
its richness and colour, its gaiety and fun and 
laughter, its gifts and surprises, its comedies and 
tragedies—these are the things which form the real 
stuff of human living, and for too many people 
they have next to nothing to do with religion. 
Whereas to be a Christian is to find and practise a 
religion which is not above or aloof from these 
things, but is woven in with them, and so woven 
with them as to determine their pattern. Jesus 
Christ quite clearly was, and is, concerned with life 
in all its fullness; 1 and any religion which is 
“ professional ” and aloof and unrelated to life ought 

1 Cf. Col. ii. io : “ It is in Him that you reach your full life ” 
(Moffatt’s translation). 


4 


INTRODUCTORY 


never to be called after His name. He came to 
show men a faith which should touch life at every 
point; His “ Incarnation ” can hardly mean less 
than that God Himself is concerned with everything 
human. Something of what is involved in this 
contact and this concern it will be the endeavour of 
the following chapters to unfold. 


I 

The desperate moral and material needs of our 
war-shattered world are sufficiently apparent, and 
there are plenty of people, outside the Churches as 
well as in them, who would be thankful enough to 
see what Christianity could do to assuage the wounds 
and rebuild the ruins. For it is generally recognized 
that history has not yet seen any considered attempt 
to apply Christianity to human affairs on any large 
scale. To quote once again G. K. Chesterton’s 
war-time dictum—for nothing more apposite on 
this topic has ever been said—“ Christianity has 
not been tried and found wanting, it has been 
found difficult and not tried.” That is exactly the 
point. And there are many signs that all sorts of 
people, superficially perhaps materialistic and not in 
the least religious, do in their heart of hearts believe 
that Christianity is worth trying, and that in the 
last resort nothing else will save the situation. For 
they are beginning to distinguish between symptoms 
and causes, and to see that, unless you can find 
something which is potent enough to reach and 
5 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


eradicate innate human selfishness, to long for a 
new world is merely crying for the moon. 

But it is not perhaps so clearly seen that if Chris¬ 
tianity is to be applied at all it must be applied all 
round. You cannot call in religion to clear up 
difficulties which defeat your skill, and then dispense 
with it in other spheres where its application might 
be inconvenient. To do that is to fall into the 
departmentalism of thought and practice which is, 
as we have seen, the negation of true religion. It 
is to be feared that such departmentalism must 
have nullified the effects of much fervent praying 
during the late war. How grotesque to beseech 
God to intervene for England’s victory unless you 
are prepared for Him to put His Hand also on 
England’s greed and England’s drink and England’s 
vice! Yet this absolute condition of any real 
application of Christianity to common concerns 
seems to escape many intelligent people. There 
are those, in business and in politics, who will talk 
in large terms about the moral solution of world 
problems, but who, when it comes to the point, are 
not at all anxious to see too close an association 
between Christianity and mundane affairs. Let the 
Churches, they say, fight drink and vice and other 
specially selected moral evils; but it’s “ hands off ” 
when it is a question of Ireland, or strikes, or 
foreign politics. The recent controversy in the 
columns of the Times 1 between the Prime Minister 
and the Bishop of Chelmsford and other religious 
leaders is full of significance. 


June 1921. 
6 


INTRODUCTORY 


II 

It is important to emphasize, at the outset of our 
studies, that this conception of a Christianity which 
can be, and is divinely intended to be, applied to 
all the range of human living is a vital part of the 
message and the life that Jesus Christ brought to 
men. If one should try and sum up in a sentence 
what the task was which Jesus undertook, and 
accomplished, it might be said that He came to 
show men God as He is, and to teach them a new 
way of living. As we shall see in further detail 
later on, these two sides of His task are inseparably 
interwoven, and much of the feebleness of our 
Christianity springs from a failure to grasp their 
close connection. If in any sense you are beginning 
to know God as Jesus reveals Him, that knowledge 
is bound to express itself in life; if you wish to 
explore the Christian way of living, you will fail 
unless you also arm yourself with His spiritual secret. 
It is with this moral and ethical side of “ original 
Christianity ” that we are for the moment con¬ 
cerned. We cannot too often or too eagerly follow 
the stream back to its source and seek to ascertain 
from Jesus Christ Himself what He really wanted 
men to do and to be. And the more we steep 
ourselves in the story of those days when He lived 
among men, the more evident does it become that 
the way of living He challenges men to adopt is 
something more than the “ holiness ” of ecclesiastics, 
which too often has an artificial smack about it, 
more also than an unattractive catalogue of virtues 
7 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 

inculcated by the moralists. The manner of life 
He summons men to share reveals an extraordinarily 
high standard, but it is never cold and rigid and 
non-human; indeed wherever the spirit of what 
He meant is truly caught by any disciple of His, 
there you have a life which is warmly, joyfully 
human, and which imports into all human concerns 
and human relationships a radiance, a romance, and 
even a gaiety, such as are not to be had from a less 
vital source. What this life is and all it involves 
can only be seen by those who are prepared to 
investigate for themselves the story of the earthly 
life of Jesus of Nazareth and the impression which 
that life made upon His contemporaries. With this 
purpose in view it is worth while taking a modern 
translation of the New Testament (such as Moffatt’s 
or Weymouth’s) and reading the gospels straight 
through, just as one would read an ordinary modern 
book, in order thus to get a general impression of 
the main features of the way of living which Jesus 
sets before us. Some details may be difficult to 
understand or to interpret, but the general outline 
will be clear enough. Think of the kind of things 
He did: the way He treated people, especially 
people whom other folk disregarded; think of the 
extraordinary fashion in which He really cared for 
them, not with a sort of professional charity or 
forced “ love,” but with real human kindliness and 
friendliness, from the time when He cheered the 
neighbours as they dropped into the carpenter’s 
shop to the day when, for their sakes, He refused to 
save Himself from the cross; and think of the 
temper and attitude of mind which lay behind this 
8 


INTRODUCTORY 


undiscouraged service of His fellow human beings. 
Think of the sort of things He said, which were 
simply a translation into words of what He was 
always doing : His description in the Sermon on 
the Mount, and in the parables, of the best kind of 
human life; His shrewd insight into every human 
weakness and His bold appeal to all the fine stuff 
latent in the man that God has made—his purity, 
his chivalry, his fundamental humility, his capacity 
to do and dare anything to help a brother man or 
serve a worthy cause. Think of the way in which 
He swept away all unrealities in religion, and recall 
His absolute insistence on the vital importance of 
right conduct, and more still on the quality of 
spirit and motive from which right action springs. 

Above all, think of the kind of picture of God 
He put before men, for in that conception of God 
the moral demand and the moral power of the 
Christian way of living have their roots. God , He 
always insists, is Life and not a religious convention . 
Reference was made, at the beginning of this 
chapter, to the curious instinct in men that makes 
them invent a sort of artificial stratum of life which 
they call religion, and then they banish God to it. 
Some of the Jewish contemporaries of Jesus Christ 
were very clever at religion-inventing, and reduced 
it to a fine art. If, for instance, you were a tailor 
and carried your needle on the Sabbath day, you 
broke an important religious law and displeased God. 
If, on the other hand, you repaired to the Temple, 
selected and paid for an appropriate animal and had 
it sacrificed, you would be doing something religiously 
meritorious. It came as quite a shock to them when 
9 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


Jesus Christ—and He somehow seemed to know— 
asserted strongly that God, the real God, had nothing 
whatever to do with that kind of thing: that, in fact, 
religion was something altogether different from what 
they supposed. He was never tired of trying to 
explain to them that God has far more to do with 
children and flowers and laughter and tears and all 
the myriad little kindly acts that weave the texture 
of common human living, than with the mass of 
religious paraphernalia which men are so fond 
of concocting. God, says Jesus Christ, is really 
interested in and concerned with all the common 
stuff of our brief lives : our hopes and fears, our 
joys and sorrows, our work and our play, and all 
the wondrous tangle of our relationships with one 
another. “ Are not two sparrows sold for a far¬ 
thing ?—and not one of them shall fall to the ground 
without your Father : but the very hairs of your 
head are all numbered.” 1 Now if God is like this, 
and if you begin to see that He is like this, then life 
takes on a different meaning altogether, and your 
reaction to life is profoundly affected. Truth is 
seen to be the echo of His Mind, goodness the 
working of His Spirit, and beauty the very texture 
of His garment; your work becomes your service 
to Him and to your fellows, and all your relationships 
with your fellow-men are brought within the magic 
circle of a great family. 

Recall, finally, that this presentation of God, with 
its summons to such a way of living, though of 
necessity profoundly and directly personal, is no 
mere individualism; it is, on the contrary, the 
1 St. Matthew x. 29. 

10 


INTRODUCTORY 


most social gospel that has ever been preached; 
when, says Jesus in effect, men will have the faith 
and courage to embark on this way of living together , 
there you have “ the Kingdom of God.” What 
else did He mean by the Kingdom of God but a 
new order of society in which selfishness should be 
ousted by love as the ruling principle of all life ? 
He goes on to say, in many different ways, that the 
goodness to which He summons men, and therefore 
the Kingdom which He plans, are feasible; they 
are ideals indeed, but ideals that are capable of 
realization. To this point we shall return later. 


Ill 

Such, in crude and broad outline, is the way of 
living to which Christ invites His disciples; a way 
of living which, if seriously pursued by even a fair 
number of persons, would be quite enough to turn 
our world into a very different kind of place. Yet, 
in this as in former generations of all the professing 
Christians alive in the world, there would seem to 
be relatively few who give a quite clear-cut impres¬ 
sion of a life truly Christ-like. Why is this ? Partly 
because it always has been, and no doubt always 
will be, “ hard to be a Christian.” It is far, far 
easier to follow the line of least resistance. And all 
honour to the gallant few who will climb any heights 
to go after Jesus. But to say this does not at all 
exhaust the answer to our question. I suggest 
that there is another reason for the relative weakness 
of practical Christianity, and that is that most 

ii 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


Christians do not really know, or at least do not 
take enough pains to find out, what it means to be a 
Christian in the twentieth century. We know, or 
think we know, in a general sort of way, but not in 
a particular sort of way; our Christianity fails when 
we reach some of the more complicated details of 
life, in fact just in those very things where it ought 
to be and might be most effective. Most of us are 
far from irreligious, and some of us are still church¬ 
goers ; but few of us are competent performers in 
the sphere of “ every-day religion.” 

I was talking about these things recently to a 
friend of mine, who is foreman in a wool factory. 
He is honestly trying, in that factory, to do his 
duty as a Christian; but he is often perplexed to 
know exactly what that duty is. “ I really want to 
bring more of Christianity into my working life,” 
he was saying to me; “ tell me what Pve got to do 
and I’ll try and do it.” To such a demand as that 
it is difficult to find a complete and wholly satis¬ 
factory answer. And for this reason, that the 
Church in our generation has not yet thought out 
in its fullness the kind of national life, social life, or 
business life that would be in harmony with the 
way of living which Christ enjoins and with the idea 
of God which He has brought to men . 1 The 
Church has not as a rule failed in enthusiasm for 
Christianity as a body of truth ; but the exploration 
of Christianity as a way of living it has largely left 
to individual pioneering and private initiative. No 

1 I use the word Church in its widest sense as denoting organized 
Christianity generally. 


12 


INTRODUCTORY 


one wants to see the Church lose its hold on funda¬ 
mental Christian doctrine; indeed as the generations 
pass it becomes more and not less vital to do the 
work of Christianizing the common thought of God. 
But many of us long to see the Church set itself, as 
seriously, to grapple with the other task, and so 
avoid the failure which waits upon a one-sided 
emphasis and a wrong proportion . 1 Moreover, this 
lop-sided tendency in the Church not only prevents 
it doing what it might be doing for the world, but 
it leads it to miss the most vital meaning of its 
cherished creeds. It comes to think of them as 
shelters to hide in, whereas they are, in fact, weapons 
to fight with, and they lose their edge if they are 
never put to their proper use. 

There is, nevertheless, good reason to hope that 
in this matter of “ applied Christianity ” our 
generation is going to witness some substantial 
progress. It is not only that, as was noticed above, 
there are a very large number of people who believe, 
if vaguely, that the world may be salvaged by trying 
Christianity. There are other people who hold that 
belief, who are resolutely determined also to find 
out, by hard thinking and by bold personal experi¬ 
ment, hozu it is going to be salvaged, and what is 
really meant by applying the principles of Jesus 
Christ to the details of modern living. And they 

1 One of our greatest Christian thinkers, Prof. D. S. Cairns, 
says in a recent article : “ Instead of claiming the whole world 
extensively and intensively for Christ, the Church has left great 
spaces in its moral demands, and into these empty houses there 
have entered the seven devils of national self-interest and the 
greed of personal gain .”—Student Movement, June 1921. 

13 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


will refuse to be discouraged either by the apathy 
of the multitude on the one hand or, on the other, 
by those who attack the Christian ethic as being, 
to-day, inapplicable and unworkable. It is intelli¬ 
gible that a man should take a frankly pagan point 
of view and say he prefers the world as it is, with a 
moderately fair chance of a good time, and without 
any nasty religious altruism to spoil a man’s hope of 
looking after himself. But it is hardly a rational 
proposition to assert that Christianity is all right 
for an individual but was never meant to apply to 
social, national and international affairs. That is 
not a distinction that can be logically sustained; 
and, at any rate, it is not the Christianity of 
Jesus Christ. He, clearly, meant to be, and must 
inevitably be, Master everywhere if He is Master 
anywhere. 


IV 

Everyone’s way of living is determined ultimately 
by his standard of values. What is life really for ? 
What are the things that really matter ? How can 
life and personality be most fully realized ? These 
questions are answered by “ the world ” in one 
way, by Jesus Christ in quite another way. It is 
important to see how great a gulf divides the two 
answers. You cannot really make a compromise 
between them, as the Church has sometimes tried 
to do, with disastrous results. You cannot serve 
God and mammon. The need of the world, and 
of the Church, to-day is for more Christians who, 

14 


INTRODUCTORY 


flinging caution and compromise to the winds, will 
take Christ’s standard of values and proceed reso¬ 
lutely to work them out in all the conditions of 
modern living. 

Chief among the possible lines of advance are 
those of corporate and personal thinking, followed 
by corporate and personal experiment. There are 
already some groups of Christians, and there ought 
to be many more, trying by joint thinking to find 
out what should be involved in Christian discipleship 
under modern conditions. With regard to corporate 
experiment, think what it might mean if sufficiently 
strong and representative groups in specific industries 
or certain professions were to make fresh and bold 
experiments in applying Christianity to their several 
callings. Meantime, pending any considerable 
Christianization of the conditions of present-day 
living, it can hardly be denied that, within the 
framework of Society as it is, there is enormous 
scope for personal adventure in Christian living. 
Everyone of us who “ means business ” in this 
matter can probably think straight away of certain 
domains of personal living and relationships (some 
of which will be discussed in the chapters that 
follow) which have never been thoroughly and finally 
claimed for Christianity. As to the importance of 
theory and practice going hand in hand, I may be 
permitted to quote a story from the mission field, 
which will emphasize the point better than any 
lengthy argument. The story goes that a Korean 
came into the study of a missionary one day and 
said, “ I have been memorizing some verses in the 
Bibifry and thought I would come and recite them 
IS 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


to you.” The missionary listened while this convert 
repeated in Korean, without a verbal error, the 
entire Sermon on the Mount. Feeling that some 
practical advice might be helpful, the missionary 
said, “ You have a marvellous memory to be able to 
repeat this long passage without a mistake. How¬ 
ever, if you simply memorize it, it will do you no 
good. You must practise it.” The Korean Chris¬ 
tian smiled as he replied, “ That’s the way I learned 
it.” Somewhat surprised, the missionary asked him 
what he meant, and he said, “ I am only a stupid 
farmer, and when I tried to memorize it the verses 
wouldn’t stick. So I hit upon this plan. I 
memorized one verse and then went out and prac¬ 
tised that verse on my neighbours until I had it; 
then I took the next verse and repeated the process, 
and the experience has been such a blessed one that 
I am determined to learn the entire Gospel of 
Matthew that way.” And he did it. 

That, after all, is the only way. The only way 
to learn to pray is, not to read books about prayer, 
but to pray. The only way to become Christlike 
is, not to devour books on Christian ethics, but to 
plunge recklessly into Christ’s way of living. And 
if a man has the pluck to do that, he will assuredly 
find that the motive and the knowledge and the 
dynamic for such a life are increasingly available. 
The power to be like Christ is, by a law that never 
fails, invariably given to those who are willing to 
walk with Him in a joyful, personal companionship. 
This is revolutionary Christianity—for to walk with 
Him and live by love does mean the turning upside 
down of all ordinary human conventions and human 
16 


INTRODUCTORY 


standards. This is creative Christianity—for it 
solves the insoluble problem of transforming human 
nature : you will never get a changed world unless 
you can provide changed men. This is the Chris¬ 
tianity after which men to-day are groping, and 
which has in it that which can save the world. 


c 


17 










































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CHAPTER II 

THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 
i. In the World 


" And it shall come to pass . . . that many nations shall come 
and say. Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, 
and to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His 
ways, and we will walk in His paths . . . and He shall judge 
among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they 
shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into 
pruning-hooks : nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, 
neither shall they learn war any more ."—Micah iv. 1-3. 

“ Christ is our peace, He who has made us a unity and destroyed 
the barrier which kept us apart ."—Ephesians ii. 14 (Moffatt's 
version). 

" The future will show whether civilisation, as we know it, 
can be mended or must be ended. The time seems ripe for a new 
birth of religious and spiritual life which may remould society, as 
no less potent force would have the strength to do."— Dean Inge. 

" The history of the human race is the diary of a bear-garden."— 
“ The Gentleman with a Duster." 

“ We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted 
that the same standards of conduct and responsibility for wrong 
done shall be observed among the nations and their governments 
that are observed among individual citizens of civilized states." 

President Wilson, 1917. 

“ Standing as I do in view of God and of eternity, I realize that 
patriotism is not enough; there must be no bitterness, no hatred 
in my heart towards anyone."— Edith Cavell, just before her 
execution. 


" He drew a circle that shut me out. 
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout ; 

But love and I had the wit to win,— 
We drew a circle that took him in." 


CHAPTER II 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 

I. In the World 

The title of this chapter is a not altogether inept 
epitome of the whole long human story since the 
earliest man emerged. From the first fumblings of 
palaeolithic man after something more communal 
than simply slaying your prey for yourself, up to 
the latest mandate given to the League of Nations 
or the proposals of the recent Washington Con¬ 
ference , 1 the problem all along, while it grows larger 
and more complex, remains essentially the same. 
But the human race is taking an unconscionably 
long time to solve it! 

Let it be said at once that anyone who cares in 
the least about “ every-day religion,” indeed anyone 
who takes life seriously at all, finds himself con¬ 
fronted by this world-old problem every day and 

1 I append one sample of the reports from Washington (Nov. 
1921): “ Humanity is moving on. From Washington comes the 
note of a new era in the world of men,” says the Sunday Express. 
" The diplomatic jargon which has always marked the conferences 
of the past is being dropped. The representatives of the nations 
are meeting each other as men on whom an enormous and wonderful 
responsibility has fallen. The need of humanity is so great, the 
agony and yearning of mankind so overpowering, that insincerity 
and artifice are crumbling to ashes before their searching flame.” 

21 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


every hour of his existence; which is perhaps 
sufficient reason for giving it a foremost place in 
this series of studies. It is with the larger, and 
what may seem the more remote, aspects of the 
problem that the present chapter is chiefly con¬ 
cerned. If it should be felt that inter-national and 
inter-racial questions are after all somewhat distant 
from the business of daily life, I would urge in 
reply that a man’s relationships with his next-door 
neighbours are inextricably bound up with his 
notions of what the world ought to be, and further, 
that, if he is proposing to live by the Christian 
standard, he must, in thought and ideal and 
imagination, apply that standard on a world scale 
while he endeavours to practise it on the scale of 
his own personal life. The two things act and 
re-act upon one another in vital and inevitable 
fashion. 


I 

The sequel to the Great War has shown that it is 
one thing to stop fighting but quite another thing 
to make peace. In Europe, with Germany crushed 
and not yet admitted into the comity of nations, 
with Austria bankrupt and starving, with the smaller 
nationalities running riot on the pretext of self- 
determination, with terror and chaos in Ireland, we 
have hardly yet begun to solve the problem of 
living together. Throughout the East, far and near, 
there are vast masses of human beings seething with 
vague hopes and unfulfilled desires; from India to 
Egypt there are populations awaking from the sleep 
22 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


of ages, while in China and Japan it is a race between 
the forces of Christianity and those of materialism 
and militarism to determine the type of the civiliza¬ 
tion that is to be. And, so far, the United States 
of America seems to show little inclination to assume 
any responsibilities towards a chaotic world from 
which she is, geographically, so comfortably removed. 

Such facts as these might appear to give some 
force to the pessimists’ assertion that the idea of 
world peace is a fantastic dream, grotesquely outside 
the region of any practical politics. Such a view, 
however, seems to many sane people singularly 
superficial, and one that fails to take account of 
some significant factors in the present situation. 
One such factor, for instance, and one the importance 
of which cannot be over-estimated, is the plasticity 
of the world as it is in this post-war period. How 
long this phase of plasticity will last no man can 
say; but there can be no doubt that at present 
most human institutions are more malleable than 
they have been for centuries, and may well remain 
in this condition for some time yet. Nothing is 
stationary; everything is moving; in General 
Smuts’ arresting phrase, “ mankind has struck its 
tents and the great caravan of humanity is once 
more on the march.” However serious our present 
discontents, there is little thought of going back¬ 
wards, to pre-war solutions or attempted solutions. 
All seem agreed that the way out is in front and not 
behind. We are at the close of an epoch; “ the vast 
procession of men is slowly turning its face the other 
way.” There is noticeable a widespread mental rest¬ 
lessness, which has its good as well as its bad sides; 

23 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


men’s minds are open and receptive, and afford a 
fruitful soil in which new ideas may germinate. Quite 
early in the war this phenomenon became noticeable. 
To quote a writer in the daily press in 1915 : 

“ We doubt whether there ever was a time when 
the minds of men were more receptive than now, 
when they felt more widely and deeply the failure 
of the old dispensations of human governance, and 
when they looked so eagerly for a new revelation of 
society based on more spiritual foundations. The 
old order has collapsed and can never be refashioned. 
The new order that is coming to birth may not 
satisfy the orthodox, but if it is to be better than 
the old it will have to be permeated with the 
essence of Christianity.” 

It may well be that our generation will be judged 
by history for the use it makes of this plastic period, 
and for the kind of mould into which it runs its 
molten metal. 

Another favourable omen which may be noted is 
the indubitable fact that a very large number of 
men and women, of many different nations, taught 
by the history of the last eight years, are beginning 
to see the sheer iniquity of militarism, with its 
creed that “ war is an essential element in God’s 
scheme of the world ” (Moltke). They are also 
beginning to note the fatuous folly and the inane 
futility of settling differences by appeal to force. 
If you have a quarrel with your neighbour, and if, 
even though you may be in the right and he in the 
wrong, you cannot agree with him, then to try and 
club him over the head settles nothing; indeed, it 
makes any real agreement, any satisfactory modus 
H 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


vivendiy far more difficult of attainment. I am 
not saying that, at our present stage of human 
development, all force is always wrong; until we 
have learnt how to use love it will be necessary that 
unsocial members of society ( e . g. criminals) should 
be restrained and coerced, under due legal safeguards. 
But as a means of adjusting what may be called 
normal differences, and especially international 
differences, force is stupid and hopeless. The 
intricate business of human living together demands 
always thought and method that are essentially 
constructive, whereas force is always destructive. 
It is not as if you could kill bad ideas, such as 
militarism, with force. All the shells and bombs in 
the world cannot destroy a wrong-headed concep¬ 
tion. That kind of remedy, consistently and con¬ 
tinuously applied, would merely end in the break-up 
of civilization. As G. A. Studdert-Kennedy puts it 
in his usual blunt and breezy fashion, “ Force is 
futile when you come to deal with realities. You 
can’t cure rabies by killing mad dogs, no matter 
how cheerfully you do it. Mad dogs when they 
get loose must be kicked or shot or destroyed 
somehow, and it requires grit and gumption to 
kill them. But to cure rabies demands grit and 
gumption of another sort. That battle must be 
fought out in a laboratory by men armed with 
patience and scientific knowledge, and not in the 
public street by men armed with ammunition belts 
and rifles. Trying to kill sin by force is as futile as 
hunting influenza bugs with a blunderbuss.” 1 

1 Lies ! p. 117. The book is full of thought and suggestiveness 
and (despite its title !) deserves careful reading. 

25 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


There is another movement of thought to-day, 
akin indeed to that distrust of force which has just 
been referred to, which may be reckoned an asset as 
we confront this tremendous problem of human 
living together. It is the steadily growing con¬ 
sciousness that progress can never be measured in 
terms of mechanism or materialism. To pile up 
money, to build empires, to cross the world by 
aeroplane, to wrest Nature’s secrets from her and 
make them serve our comfort and convenience in a 
thousand different ways—all these things count for 
next to nothing if meanwhile there is little or no 
advance in the things of the spirit. We live at the 
close of a century of amazing mechanical triumph; 
we can achieve things, in the region of applied 
science, at which our grandfathers would have 
gasped; and the total result seems to be that the 
world’s body has outgrown its soul. What is the 
good of all our science if we only harness it to hate 
and to the forces of destruction ? What is the 
good of a whole world of enormously successful 
business and mechanism and organization and 
applied science if, instead of mastering these things, 
we are mastered by them ? Many are asking these 
questions to-day in all seriousness; and many others, 
apparently absorbed in pleasure or money-making, 
are dimly aware of such thoughts just below their 
consciousness. The truth is we are not yet big 
enough to master our altered world; “ the world is 
^ new, and we have only one way to meet it: we 
must become new men.” 


26 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


II 

Something of this instinct as to the futility of 
force and the ultimate supremacy of the spiritual, is 
already finding outlet and expression in the new-born 
League of Nations. The League is barely estab¬ 
lished as yet, but it is something to have made a 
beginning. It is at least some set-off to the disasters 
(some would say, the betrayals) of Versailles, and 
the ill-judged attempt—surely doomed to failure— 
to devise for Germany a kind of economic slavery 
which is to last, according to the terms, till i960 
(think of the arrogance of one generation seeking 
thus to legislate for posterity l), 1 and, if justice and 
peace and liberty are words that have any meaning, 
it was to save the world from this kind of bondage 
of fear and vengeance that those millions of brave 

1 Cf. The Round Table , June 1921, pp. 601 ff.: “ In the long 
run no Committee of Guarantees, but force alone, can compel a 
great nation to make such sacrifices. Is it conceivable that for 
half a century or more the threat of occupying the Ruhr will be 
periodically invoked in order to compel a population of over sixty 
millions, which will every year, ex hypothesis become more highly 
industrialized and productive of greater wealth, to continue to pay 
this tribute ? To make the threat effective France and her Allies 
would require to maintain a superiority of armed force such as 
must prove an intolerable burden to themselves. At the end of 
all, the stage would have been set for a war of revenge. 

“ Sooner or later France and the world must come to see the 
absurdity of such an ending. France naturally feels a profound 
sense of insecurity in the presence on her frontier of a population 
twice as large as her own, and separated from her only by a secular 
antagonism and the common memory of unprovoked invasion. 
But can any attempt to remove that insecurity succeed so long as 
the antagonism remains ? Germany as a military power has been 

27 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


men laid down their lives. * 1 It need not be denied 
that the attainment of abiding peace is the hardest 
task humanity has ever set before itself: “ Of all 
achievements deserving our pursuit, peace is the 
last that can be taken with a run.” And the League 
has, of course, plenty of ill-wishers, and there are 
plenty more who dismiss it as a wild project of 
optimistic idealism that takes no account of hard 
facts. Utopian it is, if you like; but then, as Lord 
Grey has publicly insisted, the alternatives are 
Utopia or Hell. That is not cheap rhetoric, but a 
sober statement of plain issues. The League has 
come to be “ an essential part of the machinery of 
civilization. If it succeeds, civilization is safe. If 
it fails, civilization is doomed.” The world of our 
day is not unlike a household in which each member 
of the family should, for some mad reason, barricade 
his room door with his chest of drawers and peer 
fearfully into the passage through chinks in the 


broken by the war, and it rests with the Allies whether German 
militarism dies or revives as a more monstrous growth than before.” 

Compare also The Observer, on the 7th Anniversary of the 
Declaration of War: “ We in this country did not wage war in 
order to do to the Germans what the Germans, if successful, 
would have done to us. We waged it to establish a higher thing— 
a saner order of international justice. What conflict had destroyed 
in Europe only co-operation between former enemies could restore.” 

1 “For many of us necessarily the first thing in life is, and for 
ever must be, to be faithful to our unwritten compact with the 
young souls whose last breath was given for the common cause; 
for the highest conception of national purpose and human ideals 
that it was in them to believe. Even the economic salvation of 
the mass of men would be worked out more straightly and surely 
if the living, generally, could contrive to be a little truer to the 
dead .”—The Observer . 


28 



THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


door. We live in a world dominated by fear; and 
where fear is, war is not far off, and, as many of us 
have good cause to know, modern warfare can best 
be described as hell. 

At last a considered and deliberate attempt 
is being made to substitute a basis of trust for a 
basis of fear in international relationships. The 
best hope of the League of Nations’ success lies in 
its appeal to every man’s deep instinct that the 
world was surely meant to be, not a cock-pit for 
senseless savage fights, but a setting for the common 
life of a rational human society. It is to this better 
self in man that the League frankly appeals in its 
insistence on the essential unity and interdependence 
of all men and all nations, in its substitution of 
right for might and reason for the sword in the 
settlement of international disputes, and in its 
introduction of the system of mandates, establishing 
thereby the principle of stewardship as between the 
stronger and the weaker nations, the more advanced 
and the more backward races of the world. Already 
(summer, 1922) the League has some solid and 
satisfactory achievements standing to its credit, and, 
once Germany is admitted, and as soon as the 
powerful aid of the United States of America, 
whether inside or outside the League, becomes 
effective, there is solid hope of still more substantial 
progress. 1 “ Our hundred millions,” says the new 

1 The League has already achieved much. It has prevented 
war between Finland and Sweden over the possession of the Aaland 
Islands; the Council of the League was called in to settle the 
Upper Silesian and Albanian disputes, and permanent Commissions 
have been appointed to supervise the mandatory system, and to 
advise on armaments. 


2 9 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


U.S. President, “ frankly want less of armament 
and none of war ”—a strong statement which many 
of us on this side of the water have read with great 
thankfulness. 

To discuss in any detail the aims and the work of 
the League is beyond the scope of this chapter; it 
is to be hoped that any who may read and agree 
with what is said here either are already or will 
shortly become members of the League of Nations 
Union and familiarize themselves with its literature. * 1 
All that I am attempting to do in this chapter is to 
indicate something of what, as it seems to me, 
ought to be the point of view of the ordinary 

The humanitarian activities of the League have been marked. 
It has suppressed the traffic in women and children; it has 
repatriated 360,000 prisoners of war; it has collected £260,000 
for fighting the typhus in Poland; and through its instrumentality 
progress is being made in the improvement of labour conditions in 
many nations. 

The Earl of Balfour’s words on the first day after his return from 
Geneva are worth quoting : “lam more than ever convinced that 
the experiment that we have begun is an experiment we never can 
afford to drop. The League of Nations may be and will be 
modified. The pact may be changed, but . . . that we can ever 
consent to go back to the international disorganization which 
preceded the League of Nations, that we can ever give up carrying 
out tasks which only the League can carry out, that civilization 
will submit to retrace one of the greatest steps ever taken, that, I 
frankly admit, seems to me absolutely incredible.” 

1 For all information about the League of Nations Union apply 
to the central offices, 15 Grosvenor Crescent, S.W.i. Of the 
Union’s many pamphlets and leaflets, three may be specially com¬ 
mended : Christianity and the League of Nations , by J. C. M. 
Garnett; Speech on a League of Nations Policy , by Lord Robert 
Cecil; Two Years ’ Work of the League of Nations. An admirable 
short book on the subject is The Quest of Nations , by T. R. W. Lunt 
(United Council for Missionary Education, 2s. 6 d.). 

30 




THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


Christian in this crucial question of world politics, 
and to show that in these things the ordinary 
Christian is, as a Christian, directly and intimately 
concerned. What then, from the Christian stand¬ 
point (and indeed the standpoint of any man of 
goodwill), are likely to be the determining factors 
and conditions in establishing anything like a real 
fellowship of nations ? 

Four such conditions may be briefly referred to. 
In the first place, any real international partnership 
will have to be a partnership of democracies, of 
peoples, not simply of governments; not something 
imposed or arranged from above, but something 
that grows from below. Nothing else can be stable 
or lasting. 1 And such partnerships will have to 
take account of other factors than national interest 
or expediency. A modern political writer 2 justly 
insists that “ treaties which are based simply on the 
self-interest of the contracting Powers, uninformed 
by any larger idea of international comity, will last 
only as long as those interests seem to coincide.” 

Secondly, any true and abiding peace will mean 
lifting up the whole idea of nationality on to an 
altogether higher level. The increasing dominance 
of the idea of nationality has been one of the most 
significant things of the age in which we live. But 
both the idea and its commonest expressions are 
still in the lower and cruder stages. As Lord Hugh 

1 The failure of the Congress of Vienna (1814) was due, among 
other causes, to the fact that its members were autocrats or the 
nominees of autocrats, and to the fact of its standing for the status 
quo , unable to see or take account of the new ideals of national 
freedom which were beginning to seize men’s minds. 

2 G. Lowes-Dickinson. 

31 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


Cecil has pointed out, one of the main causes of 
war is the proposition that men owe a boundless 
devotion to their own country and none whatever 
to any other country. He justly urges that “ what 
is needed is to realize that nationalism is not a 
quasi-religion, as some people seem almost to 
imagine, but a human passion, like other passions 
beneficent only so long as it is strictly disciplined 
and controlled by the moral law, mischievous and 
debasing so soon as it passes beyond that control. 
Nationalism is like the passion of acquisition or the 
passion of possession or the passion of sex. Within 
the limits which moralists have long ago assigned 
to them, these passions are beneficent; they are, 
indeed, the mainspring of a very large part of human 
action. But we have long ago learned not to tolerate 
their excess beyond the limits of the moral law. 
We should not be impressed if a thief at the Old 
Bailey dilated on the wholesome joy of acquisition, 
or if a ravisher quoted the amatory poets in a 
sentimental vein; yet we listen to just such 
absurdities from offending nationalists. We are 
almost put to silence about their crimes when they 
talk of their love for their country. Patriotism has 
become , in a different sense from Dr. Johnson's meaning , 
the last refuge of a scoundrel; or rather , it is his 
convenient cudgel to batter critics dumb." 1 Any real 
international partnership will demand from the 
citizens of all nations, not less patriotism, but a 
stronger and loftier patriotism; not the blind and 
selfish patriotism which desires only national aggran¬ 
dizement and national gain, but that far purer love 
1 A letter to the Times, October 1921. 

32 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


of country which would fain see it play its part in 
some real international partnership and make its 
own special contribution to the common good of 
the whole world. It is no good disguising the fact 
that any such change of thought and practice would 
amount to a revolution. For it must involve some 
surrender of national rights and national sovereignty; 
and it is wholly irreconcilable with the notions of 
militarism and imperialism. It has been said with 
perfect truth that the idea of supremacy goes out 
of history if the League of Nations idea comes in. 

Once again, there can never be any successful 
League of Nations until we all learn to conceive of 
Peace not as a mere cessation of fighting, but as 
itself something positive, interesting, desirable, con¬ 
structive ; a Cause more worth while, more alluring, 
more compelling than that for which any war has 
ever been fought. Enthusiasm for war will only be 
banished by enthusiasm for peace. William Morris 
used to urge that “ it is not enough to preach 
peace by talking of the horrors of war; for men are 
so made that they prefer horrors to dullness. You 
must persuade them that peace means a fuller and 
more glorious life if you would make them desire it 
passionately.” 1 The same thought has been ex¬ 
pressed vividly by H. G. Wells in his Joan and 
Peter : I make no apology for quoting the whole 
passage, so forcefully does it sum up and illustrate 
the present argument. “ War,” says Peter (an 
airman with war experience on the Western Front), 
“ War is an activity. Peace is not If you take 

1 William, Morris: His Work and Influence, by A. Clutton 
Brock, p. 23 (Home University Library). 

D 33 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


war out of the world, you must have some other 
activity. . . . What struggle is going to take the 
place of war ? What is mankind going to do ? Do 
you remember how bored we all were in 1914 ? 
And the rotten way we were all going on then ? A 
world State or a League of Nations with nothing to 
do but to keep the peace will bore men intolerably. 
. . . We don’t want a Preventive League of 
Nations: it’s got to be creative or nothing. . . . 
No peace, as we have known peace hitherto, offers 
such opportunities for good inventive work as war 
does. . . . There’s no comparison between the ex¬ 
citement and the endless problems of making a real, 
live, efficient submarine, for example, and the 
occupation of designing a great big, safe, upholstered 
liner in which fat swindlers can cross the Atlantic 
without being seasick. War tempts imaginative, 
restless people, and a stagnant peace bores them. 

. . . People with intelligence and imagination won’t 
stand a passive peace. Under no circumstances can 
you hope to induce the chap who contrived the 
clock fuse, and the chap who worked out my gasbag, 
or the chap with a new aeroplane gadget, and me— 
me too—to stop cerebrating and making our 
damnedest just in order to sit about safely in 
meadows joining up daisy chains.” 

It remains to point out, in the fourth place, that 
these conditions of any lasting and satisfying world 
peace do unquestionably involve a fundamental 
change in the general outlook of men and nations, 
a change that cannot be achieved without the 
operation of some extraordinarily potent spiritual 
dynamic. If for the forces of inertia, bureaucracy, 
34 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


militarism, greed, selfishness and fear there are to 
be substituted the forces of faith, hope and love, of 
conscience, co-operation, chivalry and goodwill, some 
colossal spiritual miracle is needed. The public 
opinion of the world is not going to be changed by- 
waving a wand, or by a widespread dislike of the 
unpleasant consequences of war. Nothing, says 
Bernard Shaw, can prevent war but conviction of 
sin. Nothing can provide the new motive and the 
new outlook but that which can profoundly touch 
and alter man’s inmost heart, giving him both the 
idea and the power to walk in a new way of living. 
Some of us are very deeply convinced that such an 
ideal and such a power are not to be found save in 
Christianity; that they are only to be had by those 
who seek them from the God of Jesus Christ. It 
was precisely to build such a world fellowship, “ the 
Kingdom of God ” as He called it, that Jesus spent 
Himself on earth; and to men now, as to men 
then, He offers both a programme for human society 
and (the very point where other schemes usually 
fail) a mystic secret for every human personality 
which alone makes the programme possible. 


Ill 

“ The unaccomplished mission of Christianity is 
to reconstruct society on the basis of brotherhood.” 
There are, at last, some signs that the Church is 
beginning to be aware of the immensity of the 
challenge and opportunity that confront her. And 
what specifically, it may be asked, ought the Church 
35 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 

to do in response to the demand to “ apply Chris¬ 
tianity ” to the problem of world peace ? In the 
first place, surely, it is for the Church, through her 
leaders, her corporate utterances, and the public 
opinion of her members, to insist, in season and out 
of season, on the absolute relevance of Christianity 
to just this kind of problem. Here at least she 
ought to be free from, or else can justifiably ignore, 
the charge of meddling in politics. Statesmen rarely 
make speeches on the topic of war and peace or the 
League of Nations without an eloquent peroration 
to the effect that the problem is at bottom a moral 
one and will only be solved with the help of religion. 
Listen, for instance, to these weighty words of Lord 
Robert Cecil: “ If we rely on the provisions of the 
Covenant to preserve peace, we shall be living in a 
fool’s paradise. In the application of the principles 
of Christianity to international relations lies the 
only solution of the problem. It is not the Covenant 
of the League of Nations which can save humanity 
and civilization, but the spirit which underlies the 
Covenant.” As the Archbishop of Canterbury has 
said, in a notable sermon preached before the 
Assembly of the League at Geneva, “ the League is 
now a living body, we want to ensure it a living 
soul.” It is for the Churches to respond to this 
challenge, not just by occasional manifestos, but by 
the careful and deliberate instruction of all their 
members and of any others whom they can reach. 
The duty of such instruction will stimulate her 
corporate thinking on these things, which thinking 
is, as we have already seen, badly in arrears; 
“ there is,” complains Dr. Cairns with justice, “ no 
36 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


common mind or standard as to what constitutes a 
Christian civilization.” 

Secondly, as her chief contribution to the solving 
of this as of other questions that press upon our 
generation, it is for the Church all the time to be 
getting on with her own peculiar, and vitally urgent, 
task, viz. that of providing Christians . Let us be 
perfectly clear about it, we shall never get a changed 
world without changed men and women; we shall 
never see any considerable Christianizing of politics, 
national or international, until there are more 
Christians available to leaven the whole vast mass 
of human thinking and human relationships. And 
while the Church dare not neglect the task of 
thinking out the relation of the Kingdom of God 
to all the complex range of human* living, she must 
all the time, with undiscouraged persistency, keep 
at her great essential work of winning men into the 
Kingdom. On this topic more will be said later. 1 

Not less vital is it, thirdly, that the Church 
should continually demonstrate to the world what 
human fellowship may be. It can hardly be without 
shame that a son of the Church should make this 
claim on behalf of the Christian society. Who are 
we, in a Church that is broken, divided, marred at 
a hundred points by a spirit of suspicion, of faction, 
of aloofness, of intolerance; a Church that has not 
yet triumphed over class distinctions and colour 
distinctions, a Church that has often sided with the 
rich against the poor, a Church that has been in 
war quick to take sides and in peace slow to forgive— 
who are we that we should preach fellowship to the 
i Cf. Chapter XIII. 

37 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


world ? And yet, despite all our failure in this 
thing, we do know, with a certainty nothing can 
shake, and within a limited range have actually 
experienced, that the only way in which barriers 
can be broken down and real fellowship achieved is 
when men come to realize themselves to be brothers 
in the family of God. We in the Christian Churches 
are perhaps at last beginning to apprehend that 
God is love , and that the one essential, unmistakable 
mark of any of His servants is to walk in love, to 
live by the binding law of fellowship. How slow 
official religion has been to see this thing and to 
proclaim it! Out of all the amazing things the 
war showed us, was there anything more amazing 
than the fact of thousands and thousands of men 
learning the joy of fellowship and the glory of 
service and not recognizing these things as Christian ? 
“ Nothing,” wrote one who did full time in the 
trenches, “ nothing has ever made me realize how 
little the teaching of Christianity had sunk into 
men’s minds until I saw men living in the Christian 
spirit and not recognizing it as such.” 

If anyone would see a living example of the way 
in which Christianity can be “ applied ” as an 
irresistible force to heal and help and reconcile, let 
him note what the Quakers have been doing in 
Germany since the Armistice. The Quakers, far 
more faithfully than any other part of Christ’s 
Church, have always insisted that the only remedy 
for our national and international ills is that men 
should love one another. True to their principles, 
immediately after the Armistice off they went to 
Germany, and “ there they have remained, doing 
38 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


works of charity to the afflicted bodies, and exem¬ 
plifying to the afflicted spirits of fallen, broken 
Germany what remedy there lies in pure religion 
and undefiled.” My quotation is from a remarkable 
description of their work in the Nineteenth Century 
and After for April 1921 by Maurice Hewlett. 
Mr. Hewlett continues: “ I have a testimony to 
this work of theirs before me now. I take the 
following from ‘ A Letter to the Quakers,’ written 
by the poet Wilhelm Schaefer, and published in the 
Frankfurter Zeitung last July.” Wilhelm Schaefer 
is not, he says, “ one of the Germans for whom 
extravagant hopes were shattered by the outcome 
of the war.” He was not then a Pan-German, nor 
is he now a Bolshevist. On the contrary, he realizes 
“ that a drop of hate sticks more tenaciously than 
all the love in the world,” and knows “ only too 
well that a victorious proletariat could help just as 
little as a victorious Germany.” On that showing 
he writes to the Quakers as follows: “ You are 
Christians, as we call ourselves Christians—although 
notwithstanding our ostensible Christianity we came 
into this world-war. We all know that love was 
the fundamental idea of Christ’s teaching, but you 
have been able to remain faithful to this teaching 
in practice. Before the stroke of fate came upon 
us, you were among us an almost unknown sect; 
now your presence among us is overshadowing all 
the Churches. Neither the Papal Bishops nor the 
Protestant Superintendents have been able to keep 
themselves pure from the war’s hatred, nor can 
they now point to any fundamental principle for 
life, as you can.” 


39 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


IV 

One last word may be added, on this inexhaustible 
theme of Christianity and world peace, from a plain 
and practical point of view. What, it may well be 
asked, can any one individual do to bend history 
towards such a goal ? There are a good many things 
he can do, especially if he realizes that it is ultimately 
the individual who counts, and that public opinion 
is the sum total of a number of private opinions. 
He can help the Church, in a hundred different 
ways, to bear its witness and make its contribution 
along the lines indicated above. Possibly a Church 
Councillor may read these lines who is conscious 
that the Church he represents never bothers its 
head about the Christian obligation to promote 
world peace. In that case, why not secure some 
members for the League of Nations Union, and 
start a study-circle, or get the parson to preach and 
lecture on the subject ? 

Again, the man who wants to help this cause will 
be careful, as a Christian, to cultivate a world 
outlook. He will refuse to be wholly absorbed in 
the needs and cares and tasks of his immediate 
environment; realizing that he serves One who 
loves the whole world, he will keep an eye on the 
far horizons, and watch for the Kingdom’s coming 
in the affairs and relations of nations and races. 
He will understand that the enterprise of Missions 
Overseas is no mere hobby of a few of the religiously 
inclined, but is vitally bound up with world peace 
and world progress, and deserves the ardent support 
of every public-minded person. These large ideas 
40 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


and spacious hopes will affect his reading as well as 
his thinking, and do much to determine his choice 
of books and papers; he will want to learn how it 
goes with the Kingdom everywhere even more than 
he wants to know who won the boxing, or the Test 
Match, or the Open Championship. And, in the 
same way, he will take pains to do a very difficult 
thing—to get his opinions and his judgments salted 
with true Christianity. There seem to be so many 
“ Christians ” whose opinions on all sorts of ordinary 
matters appear to have strayed miles away from the 
ideas and standards of Jesus Christ. Perhaps very 
often the last part of a man to be converted is the 
region of his political opinions and prejudices. Not 
that all “ Christian ” opinions would necessarily be 
the same : they will surely show a wide divergence 
within the limits of being Christian. But to be 
“ Christian ” in a true sense they must be caught from 
Christ and thought out in relation to His standards, 
and they must be developed and matured within and 
not without the circle of a man’s deepest praying. 

Above all, if any would help to solve the problem 
of human living together on the widest scale, let 
him on the scale of his own life fling himself into 
the adventure of living by Christ’s law of fellowship, 
sparing no pains to bring all his ordinary relationships 
within the circle of the Love of God. What will this 
mean in actual practice ? For answer we may well 
turn to the most matchless picture of a love-domin¬ 
ated life that has ever been given, that by St. Paul 
in his Corinthian letter. I quote it here in full, using 
(with his kind permission) a paraphrase made by my 
friend the Principal of the Knutsford Test School: 

4i 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


“ If I have all the gifts of a revivalist and have 
not love, I am merely a braying trumpet, or the 
clapper of a bell. Though I am a preacher and 
know all God’s secrets, and all the Theology there 
is, and though I believe in God so much that I can 
remove mountains, but have not love, I do not 
count. Though I spend all my income on Philan¬ 
thropy, though I am ready even for the stake, but 
have not love, there is nothing in it. Love does 
not take offence, is always trying to do good turns 
to others. Love is not jealous, does not swagger, 
does not stand on its dignity. Always behaves like 
a gentleman, never plays for its own hand; does 
not get peevish; sees the best in others; always 
champions the under dog; is glad when other people 
find the truth; never loses courage; never loses 
faith; never loses hope; always sees it through to 
the end. Love never lets you down. If it is 
sermons, they will be out of date; if it is emotion¬ 
alism, it will stop; if it is theology, it will be 
superseded. For our knowledge is fragmentary, and 
our preaching is fragmentary. When the perfect 
whole has come, the fragmentary will be out of 
date. When I was a child, I used to talk like a 
child, I used to think like a child, I used to reason 
like a child. When I became a man, I found childish 
things out of date, for now we see but a blurred 
reflection, but then face to face. Now my know¬ 
ledge is partial, but then I shall know fully for 
myself, just as God already knows me. These are 
the three things which stand the test: faith, hope 
and love, but the biggest of these is love.” 


42 


CHAPTER III 

THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 
2 . Within the Nation 


*' Jesus said : My rule of life is this : you are to treat every one 
else as you would like people to treat you; this is the essence of 
God’s revealed law of conduct.”— St. Matthew vii. 12 (paraphrase 
by J. A. Findlay). 

“ If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: 
for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can 
he love God whom he hath not seen ? ”—1 John iv. 20. 

" He looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder 
and maker is God.”— Hebrews xi. 10. 


“ To seek for the reproduction of Christ’s mind in the mind of 
the community is the greatest aim that we can cherish.”— Phillips 
Brooks. 


“ If we do not Christianize industry, industry will de-Christianize 
England.” 


" Is it a dream ? Let us shape it to action. 

Mighty with truth’s irresistible strength. 

Bold with the courage which fears no detraction. 

Shall we not climb to the vision at length ? 

Ever the dream-light grows clearer and finer. 

Ever the stars draw us up from the sod. 

Up to the light of the glory diviner. 

Nearer the infinite glory of God.” 

“ If the Christian ideal vividly expressed and plainly translated 
into terms of action could be proclaimed, we believe that the new 
age now opening might be fashioned according to the pattern of 
Jesus Christ. We Christians can only fail if we are either not 
intelligent enough to understand our Gospel or not honest enough 
to apply it.”— Statement of Aims of the Conference on Christian 
Politics, Economics and Citizenship. 


CHAPTER III 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 

2 . Within the Nation 

I 

I know an alley in Shadwell, S.E., which you 
would think a fit habitation for rats, but not for 
the human beings who do in point of fact live 
there. Never have I seen houses so grimy and 
filthy and repulsive; they can hardly have had a 
wash or coat of paint since they were first put 
together by the original jerry-builders. The houses 
look out on to a high blank wall, as filthy as them¬ 
selves, at a distance of exactly five feet. In them 
you will find people living, several families to a 
house, people who often have not got enough to 
eat, and who in any case know, and can know, next 
to nothing of the real meaning of life. It is just 
two miles to the nearest park or open space of any 
kind, and the poor frowsy-looking women seem to 
have become infected with the squalor and ugliness 
of their surroundings. 

I stood in that alley one day, reflecting on the 
fact that it is not exceptional but typical, and that 
millions of other human beings, in England and 
elsewhere, live under similar conditions . . . and I 
45 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


felt almost ashamed of the pleasant setting of my 
own life, with its congenial work and happy home 
and all the beauties of God’s earth close at hand. 
And I went on to ask myself the question, What 
has Religion got to say to this repulsive scene ? 
Surely this alley and these hovels mean that in the 
business of human living together something has 
gone hideously wrong ? What is the cause and 
meaning of it, and has Religion got any remedy to 
propose ? 

Now Religion, and by Religion I mean here the 
Christianity of our time, has usually said one of two 
things when confronted with this kind of human 
misery. It either says that the “ saving of a man’s 
soul ” is so overwhelmingly important that nothing 
else about him, such as his house and his clothes, 
can be said to matter very much, and that in any 
case undeserved suffering in this world will be made 
up for in another, where all wrongs will be put 
right. Or it says (and this is the view which 
underlies every sentence in this book) that the 
external things of a man’s life do matter very much 
indeed, and that Christianity is profoundly con¬ 
cerned with them, and is not at all prepared to 
postpone to another world the setting right of human 
wrongs. This view agrees with the first-named, 
that Jesus Christ died, and lives, to “save” man¬ 
kind ; but it holds, with passionate conviction, that 
you cannot detach a man’s “ soul ” for the purposes 
of religion, nor can you isolate the life of the spirit; 
rather, the “ Life ” which is God’s gift to men is 
something for the whole personality in all its 
elements and relationships, material as well as 
46 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


spiritual, and is intended by Him to be realized in 
very large measure in this world. Else why are we 
taught to pray “ Thy kingdom come ... on 
earth ” ? 

Consider for a moment what is involved in this 
idea of realized Life , for in it we shall find a principle 
to guide us amid the complexities and ramifications 
of the inexhaustible topic of these two chapters. 
If there is any meaning and purpose in the world, 
and if Jesus Christ is right about the absolute value 
of human personality (see, for instance, St. Luke xii. 
6, 7, 22-32, xv., and many similar passages), then 
the conclusion is irresistible that every single human 
being has the right to an opportunity of living the 
best and fullest life of which he is capable. That 
the capacity to “ live ” varies indefinitely, and that 
numbers may reject or misuse their opportunity to 
live does not invalidate every man’s right to a 
freedom to shape his outer life to his inner ideal, to 
a reasonable scope for the development of person¬ 
ality, to “ such a life,” in Hooker’s phrase, “ as our 
nature doth desire : a life fit for the dignity of 
man.” At present, such a life is the privilege of 
the few, and the many have to view it from afar, as 
an unattainable dream. 1 How can you live “ a life 
fit for the dignity of man ” if you and all your 
family are herded together in one or two dirty 


1 “ Civilization, with all its enrichments, has hitherto been 
possible only for a tiny section of the human race. . . . Our 
object should be to extend as fast as is humanly possible the 
boundaries of civilization so that every man shall be in the ordinary 
sense of the word a gentleman, with all the liberties and oppor¬ 
tunities of a gentleman.” 


47 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


rooms, 1 if your work is some soulless monotonous 
drudgery, if your earnings barely suffice for food 
and clothes, if you are never free from the fear of 
going under in the struggle for existence, if you 
have neither the knowledge nor the means nor the 
leisure to enter any of the thousand gates that open 
on the wide domains of truth and beauty ? That— 
that maimed, stunted, imprisoned life, is what 
“ poverty ” means. And such poverty is the lot of 
some hundreds of thousands of our fellow-citizens 
in this wealthy land; poverty which inevitably 
entails physical and mental deterioration, and almost 
inevitably moral deterioration as well. 

Yet it is impossible to describe this matter of full 
human living in terms of rights . If one should use 
such a phrase as “ the right to Life,” it must in the 
same breath be added that your right to “ live ” 
carries with it a bounden duty to recognize and 
facilitate your neighbour’s right to “ live ”; for 
the very good reason that true life is incompatible 
with any form of selfishness. He whose supreme 
gift is abundant life has been at pains to make men 
understand that “ whosoever will save his life shall 
lose it, but whosoever shall lose his life for My sake 
and the gospel’s, the same shall save it,” 2 and to 
insist that you should “ love your neighbour as 
yourself ” (which means that his attainment of Life 
should matter to you as much as your own). 

1 “ In such a home,” writes one who endured it for many years, 
“ I discovered the depths of discomfort, ugliness, irritations of 
flesh and spirit, weariness and indignity, that are inseparable from 
the herding together of human beings in ugly, inconvenient 
surroundings ” (The Woman in the Little House , bv M. L. Eyles). 

2 St. Mark viii. 35. 


48 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


One other preliminary, but fundamental, con¬ 
sideration may be emphasized here. It is that this 
human heritage of an adequate Life, or rather the 
opportunity to appropriate this heritage, can never 
be enjoyed by the majority of men so long as it is 
left to individuals to seize it as best they can. 
Such an arrangement, or lack of arrangement, is a 
survival of paganism, and merely means that the 
weaker ones are pushed to the wall and get nothing. 
Life which is not, as we have seen, a purely personal 
possession, can only become available for individuals 
by joint action; it can only be enjoyed by the 
various members of a community through the united 
efforts of the community as a whole. What is 
called the “ Social Problem ” largely consists in the 
facts that, hitherto, all who could have seized for 
themselves this “ right to Life,” disregarding the 
claims of the rest, and that the community as a 
whole has never taken any effective steps to secure 
the exercise of the right to its weaker members. 
At best the community has been too neutral; at 
worst it has taken sides with the “ haves ” as against 
the “ have-nots.” 


II 

Let us examine a little more closely this widespread 
lack of the means of Life. (It may be said, in 
passing, that this chapter is not an attempt to make 
any serious, still less new, contribution to the solution 
of an extremely complex question. It is simply an 
endeavour to take stock of the situation from a 
Christian point of view, especially for the sake of 
the “ plain man ” who feels dimly that society is 
e 49 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


wrong, and that only Christianity can set it right, 
but has little time, or possibly inclination, to read 
much of the vast literature that is growing up 
round this subject.) 

Now it can be safely asserted that this terribly 
common lack of the opportunity to live is not a 
chance thing, nor inevitable; it is the result of 
certain causes, and those causes, in the case of our 
own land, are chiefly to be found in the kind of 
society and industry which have developed during 
the past two centuries and which in the main prevail 
to-day. And what is this kind of civilization that 
has thus grown up ? The answer is, according to 
some clear thinkers, that we have allowed ourselves 
to become an almost purely “ acquisitive society ” ; 1 
that is, the common criterion of “ success ” is that 
of getting and having and holding, while, until 
recently, all that society as a whole has done has 
been to hold the ropes and keep the ring while 
every man struggled for himself. After making due 
allowance for the selfish and predatory instincts in 
man, it may still be a matter of wonder how it is 
that “ Christian England ” has developed this kind 
of “ acquisitive society.” The chief explanation is 
to be looked for in the history of the last two 
hundred years. The story of the industrial revolu¬ 
tion is sad reading. An age of scientific and 
mechanical discovery made some great industrial 
development inevitable; but it was surely not 
inevitable, if more men had been true to the ideals 

1 See Mr. R. H. Tawney’s able and valuable book, The Acquisitive 
Society (Bell, 4 s. 6 d.). I am indebted to Mr. Tawney for some of 
the thought in this chapter. 

So 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


they had, that such development should be the 
occasion for the growth of a large-scale selfishness, 
for a materialism that exalts property above person¬ 
ality, and for a ruthless and systematic exploitation 
of the labour of the men, women, and children of 
the working classes. There is no space here to 
dwell upon details of this history (which should be 
studied in such books as J. L. Hammond’s The 
Town Labourer , 1760-1832); but the main facts of 
the last 150 years should never be allowed to fade 
out of sight, for they are the chief explanation of a 
great deal of the industrial unrest of our day. Trade 
disputes and strikes are not very surprising when 
you observe that those who labour with their hands 
are at last beginning to be aware of the full human 
life which, so far, has been beyond the reach of 
most of them, and when you note that, in the past, 
there has been no other way for them to obtain a 
fuller share in that Life save to band themselves 
together and seize it. 1 

That this should be so, is characteristic of a social 
system which is based on acquisitiveness. A large 
part of modern industry is organized, not chiefly to 
supply what people want, but to make as much 
profit as possible out of the producing process and 
to distribute the profit, not among the producers, 
but to those who have bought the privilege of 
receiving it. As an inevitable result of such a system, 

1 “ Since the industrial revolution it has been axiomatic in the 
business world that man was made for industry, and not industry 
for man—a proposition usually summed up in the trite phrase, 

* business is business.* **—Bishop of Peterborough, Interpreters 
0/ God , p. 81. 

51 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


gain counts more than service, mechanism more 
than men; humanity is ignored, the real meaning 
of Life is missed, and industry becomes an end in 
itself, instead of a means to an end. 1 Such a system 
directly engenders self-interest and self-seeking, and 
provides a highly favourable soil for the twin evils 
of abject poverty and swollen prosperity. And it is 
not surprising that, where the system as a whole 
knows so little of moral purpose or moral method, 
its details should often be irreconcilable with the 
dictates of truth and honour. Many a man has 
had to choose between conforming to a lower moral 
standard and losing his job, and with it his liveli¬ 
hood. 2 It is, of course, undeniable that within the 
system there are large numbers of individual people 
and of individual firms who escape the general 
infection and bring to their work higher motives 
and honourable methods. But, however numerous 
such exceptions, they do not alter the fact that 
industry as a whole is more concerned to make 
large profits than to care for the well-being of its 

1 Cf. The Acquisitive Society , p. 48: “ Men may use what 
mechanical instruments they please and be none the worse for 
their use. What kills their souls is when they allow their instru¬ 
ments to use them” 

2 A letter in a recent issue of the Challenge (August 8, 1921) gives 
two instances that had come within the writer’s knowledge. “ A 
man employed in a wholesale hosiery trade found that he was 
expected to pack a defective pair of stockings in every bundle of 
six to be sent to the retailer. Although he was a married man 
with a family, he had the courage to throw up the work rather 
than proceed with the dishonesty. A girl employed by a well- 
known drapery firm was expected to sew labels bearing the word 
‘ Reduced ’ on sale goods when she knew quite well that no 
reduction had taken place.” 


5* 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


workers and to render service to the community. 
And I find it hard to conceive how anyone who 
wants to see the law of Christ prevail and believes 
that God has in store for humanity some far better 
world order than we have yet seen, and then notes 
the type of civilization we now enjoy, can be other 
than a revolutionary. He must, that is, ardently 
long, not for a revolution in the sense of a violent 
catastrophe with riot and bloodshed, but for one 
that shall mean a complete and drastic change of 
mind in men generally, a change of mind that will 
express itself in a new and more satisfying form of 
civilization. 


Ill 

Idealists are trying people because they are 
frequently so vague. Those of us who believe that 
our present industrial and social arrangements are a 
remarkably poor attempt to solve the old problem 
of human living together are often asked what exactly 
we should propose to put in the place of the present 
system. That question I will try to answer, and 
indicate what an industrial order would be like 
which had more of Christianity in it. But, though 
I write as a Christian, it is only fair to point out 
that there is to-day a significant and a growing 
consensus of opinion, reached from very different 
points of view, as to the kind of common Life that 
is desirable; and indeed here and there it is already 
beginning to take shape. Any social and industrial 
system which is going to satisfy the new ideals and 
new conscience about these matters (a conscience 
considerably quickened during and since the Great 
53 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


War) will have to be marked by three characteristics, 
each of them of fundamental importance. They 
may be summed up in three words—service, 
co-operation, and humanity. 

Take, first, the idea of service. Why should not 
industry be animated by the same kind of aim and 
outlook that characterize what are called “ the 
professions ” ? Doctors and parsons and teachers 
do not, as a rule, make money their first considera¬ 
tion ; they are glad enough to get a living wage 
and to enjoy sufficient financial security, but the 
main object of work with most of them is not 
money but what they can do for their fellow human 
beings. Why should not a similar motive govern 
the industrial process ? In point of fact it is service 
to the community to build its houses, provide its 
food, make its clothes, clean its drains and arrange 
its transport; why then should not industry be 
recognized as such and organized with that end in 
view? Profit there would still be; but the com¬ 
munity (acting possibly through the medium of 
Trades Councils or Guilds) would find the way to 
effect some rational limitation of the profit made, 
and to secure a fairer distribution of it as between 
those who have lent capital and those who perform 
the actual labour. Until industry is re-organized 
in some such way as this, it is almost impossible for 
the individual worker, toiling perhaps at some 
monotonous and exacting task, to feel the inspiration 
and uplifting of his daily drudgery that comes from 
seeing it as essential service and having it recognized 
and rewarded as such by the rest of the community. 
It is, of course, true that such a far-reaching change 
54 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


can only be brought about by a new spirit operating 
everywhere, in the director’s room, the manager’s 
office, the factory, the shop, the farm and the 
field; but why should we not look for the growth 
of such a spirit ? Why should not the Army and 
Navy tradition of noblesse oblige come to inspire all 
common life and labour ? The poor scepticism that 
says men will only respond to the stimulus of selfish 
gain, or must always work out their destiny on the 
animal level of a struggle for existence, is simply 
blind to the higher and truer facts of human nature ; 
the war surely has taught us that if it has taught us 
nothing else. Let men be given but the chance to 
live their life and do their work on the loftier levels 
of service, and their response, it may justly be 
claimed, would be surprising and magnificent. 

But if industry is to function as “ service,” it 
must, secondly, know a far higher degree of co-opera¬ 
tion. A great deal of the hard drive and merciless 
pressure of modern industry, pressure that bears 
hardest on the lower strata of workers, is directly 
due to the relentless competition which is almost 
universal (and which, in its turn, is an inevitable 
element in the race for profits referred to above). 
Indeed a large move away from unrestricted com¬ 
petition and towards intelligent co-operation is 
already discernible; men are beginning to see the 
futility and waste of power in, say, half a dozen 
milk-carts from as many different firms rattling down 
the same street of a morning, and to realize that 
some form of partnership, as between different firms 
in the same trade and between employer and 
employed, will in the end produce more, make 
55 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


more things to go round, and thus conduce to the 
general benefit. 1 Here again it is true that such a 
change of external organization will only come in 
response to the imperative demand of a changed 
human spirit; as someone has said, you cannot 
pool industries like the coal-mines, unless you can 
“ pool ” human hearts and human motives. The 
many unmistakable signs of such a demand are a 
sufficient answer to those who say that all these 
things are governed by the immutable law of pure 
economics, and that to try and change them is as 
futile as charging a brick wall. As G. A. Studdert- 
Kennedy has recently pointed out, there is no such 
thing as a “ purely economic ” question, because 
economics are ultimately human, they are just what 
men make them. And there is no reason to suppose 
that it is really more “ natural ” to men to fight 
than to share and to combine. Who can look on 
the almost irrepressible brotherly instincts of man, 
and the way in which the modern mechanism of 
world-intercommunication almost forces men into 
neighbourliness, and deny that the instinct of 
fellowship and the skill to co-operate are the real 
law of human life and the supreme pow r er in the 
world ? 

Thirdly, a way must be found for the humanizing 
of industry . No social and industrial system can be 
satisfying unless within it men can live their life 
and do their work as men and not as “ hands ”— 
God forgive us that such an expression ever found 
its way into our common language ! A system which 
treats men as cogs in a machine, which chains human 

1 Cf. Competition: a Study in Human Motive (Macmillan). 

56 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


personalities, without any variation or relief, to 
soulless or repulsive tasks, which condemns them 
to the monotonous manufacture of “ superfluous 
futilities,” is clearly not to be tolerated by any 
enlightened common conscience. There is no 
“ life ” for a man worthy of the name unless in his 
home and in his work he is able to express his 
manhood, to exercise his creative capacity, to develop 
his personality, to have space and opportunity to 
grow character ; and yet in thousands of shops and 
mines and factories to-day men’s labour is bought 
and used while the personality behind the labour is 
totally ignored. As a worker said to a friend of 
mine, “ When I pass through the factory gates of a 
morning, I feel I leave my personality outside and 
become just a number.” I have been told on good 
authority that the real cause of a coal strike in 
Wales a few years ago lay in the following circum¬ 
stance. A day labourer was killed while working 
in a mine. In accordance with their custom, the 
miners to show their sympathy stopped work and 
brought the body to the surface and did not return 
to the pit that day. When pay day came they 
found they were all docked a day’s wages, including 
the dead man for the day on which he died ! Could 
callousness further go ? 

In all these things there are, at last, signs of a 
great change coming. There is a growing consensus 
of opinion that the first charge on every industry 
should be the well-being of the workers, and that 
to his well-being the following conditions constitute 
the minimum of what is essential: (a) a living 
wage, ( b) proper housing, (c) security from unem- 
57 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


ployment, (d) a recognized status in industry, and 
(e) proper conditions of work (involving adequate 
leisure). On the lowest grounds it is obvious that 
in the end the fulfilment of these conditions means 
better business and higher productiveness; while 
from humanitarian and even Christian motives many 
individuals and firms are already striving for reform. 
A welcome and notable factor in the coming of 
reform is the growing movement among business 
men, for the most part unprompted by the Churches, 
to permeate business with the principles of service 
and humanity; such as the Rotary Club, which 
originated in America, and in our own land the 
National Movement towards a Christian Order of 
Industry and Commerce . 1 


1 The Movement’s aim is “ To rally men of goodwill engaged 
in the administration of industry, commerce and the professions, 
for the application of Christian principles to industrial, commercial 
and professional life ”; and it has put forward the following 
“ Demands of Christian Principles in Industry ” : 

1. The governing motive and regulative principle of all industry 
and commerce should be service of the community. 

2. The receipt of an income lays on the individual the duty of 
rendering service in accordance with his capacity. Every person 
should perform the best possible work. 

3. The receipt of an income from industry should carry with it 
a responsibility for the conditions and purpose of the industry. 

4. Any competition should be subordinated to the service of 
the community. 

5. Industry should create and develop human fellowship, and 
any practices calculated to destroy such fellowship are immoral. 

6. The value of all natural resources and of every privilege 
which owes its worth to the labour of all or to the necessities of all 
should be held and utilized for the benefit of all. 

7. Every individual man and woman is of intrinsic worth, and 

58 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


IV 

Here then is a social programme which, at very 
many points, is entirely Christian. Brotherhood, 
fellowship, partnership, the “ family ” idea, the 
absolute value of every human personality, the con¬ 
ception of rich life, of common good, of far-reaching 
purpose—these are all fundamental things in Chris¬ 
tianity. And, as has been already claimed, the hope 
of the situation lies in the fact that Christianity 
goes infinitely further than pointing an ideal, in 
that it releases a universally available power for its 
achievement. Once more the question may be 
asked, What response is the Church making to such 
a tremendous challenge and such an unequalled 
opportunity ? 

It may, I think, be claimed that the Church is 
just beginning to fulfil the first condition of render¬ 
ing any effective help : the condition of recognizing 
with frankness and sorrow all that has been left 

human labour cannot be regarded as a commodity. Therefore, 
every industry should be organized to provide : 

(1) As a first charge an income sufficient to maintain, in 

reasonable comfort, all engaged in it. 

(2) Provision for any special burden to which those engaged in 

the industry may be liable, such as undue fluctuations in 
work, sickness, etc., owing to the conditions of that 
industry—this in addition to any general provision which 
may be made by the State or otherwise. 

(3) Provision for superannuation—this in addition to any general 

provision which may be made by the State or otherwise 

(4) Healthy conditions for all engaged in the industry. 

(5) Opportunities for development of personality, talents and 

self-expression. 


59 



EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


undone, of confessing the sin of her corporate apathy 
towards the terrible social evils of the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries, and of feeling a yet deeper 
shame for the miseries that still persist. There are 
also signs that she is beginning to accept the 
imperative duty of thinking out what is involved in 
the attempt to apply Christianity to society and 
industry. It is for the Church to endeavour to 
provide a Christian environment in addition to 
building up individual Christian lives; for can there 
ever be true Christian living in un-Christian con¬ 
ditions of life ? And there must already be numbers 
of Christians who want to do the right thing by 
their neighbours, socially and industrially, if only 
the Church would tell them what to do . 1 

Three other points may be emphasized in this 
summarized statement of the Christian solution of 
the “ Social Problem.” In the first place, to repeat 
what was said in the last chapter and what cannot 
be urged too often, the Church must never for an 
instant relax her efforts to perform what must always 
be her main work, namely, that of providing more 
Christians. It is Christians, men and women 
inspired by the love of Jesus Christ, who can create 
a new public opinion without which no large reform 

1 I should like to see the creation and development of some 
kind of permanent Christian Council of all the Churches, a sort of 
“ General Staff ” for the joint Christian armies, to think, and 
watch, and act for the Church. One whole department of such a 
staff would concern itself with the Christianizing of industry and 
commerce, just as another would be charged with the business of 
spreading Christianity overseas. The last named indeed has already 
come into being, in the Standing Committee of the Conference of 
all the Missionary Societies. 


60 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


is possible . 1 It is the spiritual experience of Chris¬ 
tians that supplies the highest form of social motive 
and social energy. It is personal Christianity that 
makes the best employers and the best workmen 
and the best neighbours. And the Christian society 
must perpetually keep before its members, with all 
its resources of instruction and of discipline, the 
very highest standard of Christian discipleship. In 
the face of the economics of materialism, it will 
have the courage to set forth the Christian ethic 
pure and undiluted. “ It will appeal to mankind, 
not because its standards are identical with those of 
the world, but because they are profoundly different. 
It will win its converts, not because membership 
involves no change in their manner of life, but 
because it involves a change so complete as to be 
ineffaceable.” 2 

Secondly, it is for Christians to show men what 
Life really signifies. Much has been said in this 
chapter about “ Life ” and men’s fundamental right 
to live it. It cannot be made too clear—and the 
Labour and Socialist gospels seem sometimes to 
blur the distinction—that to remove the material 
hindrances to true living is one thing, but to bestow 
on men the secret of Life is quite another thing. 
If you could at a stroke abolish slums and poverty 
and all the evils of our industrial system, that 

1 There cannot, as yet, be much Christian public opinion for 
the Government to heed when at present (summer 1921), after 
pouring millions of money into Mesopotamia, they say they can 
only afford £200,000 for new housing at home, and when, despite 
the forthcoming disarmament Conference, they are proposing to 
spend thirty million pounds on new battleships! 

2 R. H. Tawney, of. cit ., p. 239. 

61 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


emancipation of human personalities would not of 
itself teach men what Life really is and how to live 
it—only Jesus Christ can do that. It is only He 
who can finally make men understand that a man’s 
life consisteth not in the abundance of things that 
he possesseth. And men to-day are groping after 
this knowledge. Indeed the unsated hunger for 
the secret of Life is one of the truly tragic phenomena 
of our day. The workers are beginning to win 
their freedom; but what is the good of being free 
to live if you don’t know how to live, or if you 
confuse “ Life ” with money or property or mean¬ 
ingless activity, or with the antics and occupations 
of the heroes and heroines of the films ? Here is 
the real end of true education , 1 as of Christian 

1 On this point Mr. Tawney’s biting words are not too strong : 

“ If a society with the sense to keep means and ends in their 
proper places did no more than secure the investment in the 
education of children of a fraction of the wealth which to-day is 
applied to the production of futilities, it would do more for 
posterity—it would, in a strictly economic sense, ‘ save * more 
* capital ’—than the most parsimonious of communities which ever 
lived with its eyes on the Stock Exchange. To one who thinks 
calmly over the recent experience of mankind, there is something 
almost unbearable in the reflection that hitherto, outside a small 
circle of fortunate families, each generation, as its faculties began 
to flower, has been shovelled like raw material into an economic 
mill, to be pounded and ground and kneaded into the malleable 
human pulp out of which national prosperity and power, all the 
kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, are supposed to be 
manufactured. In England a new race of nearly 900,000 souls 
bursts upon us every year; and if, instead of rejuvenating the 
world, they grind corn for the Philistines and doff bobbins for 
mill-owners, the responsibility is ours into whose hands the pro¬ 
digality of Nature pours life itself, and who let it slip aimlessly 
through the fingers that close so greedily on material riches.” 

62 


THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER 


evangelism : to show men how to enter into the 
infinitely wonderful heritage of truth, goodness and 
beauty which God gives to all who humbly seek 
Him. 

Finally, it may be stated once more, and with 
uncompromising directness, that Christianity offers 
not only the promise of a new and better world, 
but also the creative, transforming power that shall 
bring it into being. The root difficulty of the 
intractability of human nature is met, and only 
met, by the extraordinary moral potency of vital 
Christianity. It is incontestable, as Dean Inge has 
pointed out, that “ the real Gospel, if it were 
accepted, would pull up by the roots not only 
militarism, but its parallel in civil life, the desire to 
exploit other people for private gain.” If, as Jesus 
Christ insists, the Love of God is the ultimate fact 
of the universe, and if, through Christ, men may 
really take hold of that Love and make it the 
governing factor in all human affairs—then, evil is 
not invincible, and the Kingdom of God is something 
practicable; indeed, its coming may be nearer than 
we think. This chapter may fitly conclude with 
some noble words of faith and hope in Malcolm 
Spencer’s suggestive book: “ When,” he says, 
“ Jesus proclaimed that 4 the Kingdom of God is 
at hand ’ He gave us the promise of a way of life 
far exceeding in goodness any conceivable Utopia 
bounded by the horizons of time and space. c Fear 
not, little flock, it is the Father’s good pleasure to 
give you the Kingdom.’ . . . God in His sovereign 
Fatherhood has made men so capable of fellowship 
and so responsive to it that it is possible for human 
63 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


life to be lived on a basis of mutual co-operation. 
All work may be made to reflect the glory of the 
Divine craftsmanship. All business organization 
may become an expression of reason and goodwill. 
All measures for the distribution of wealth may be 
governed by the ambition to make life rich for 
everyone. All government may be administered 
with respect for personality, all laws made increas¬ 
ingly the embodiment of a common mind and will. 
The whole fabric of political organization may be 
inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. The same 
love, the same glory, the same peace and joy given 
to individual religious experience, may find their 
counterpart in the conduct of the organized life of 
the world.” 1 

1 The Social Function of the Church , pp. 97-8. 


Note. —Preparation is in progress at the present time for an 
attempt, on a large scale and carefully thought out, to discover 
and express the mind of Christ for society and industry. The 
attempt will take the form of a Conference (interdenominational) 
on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship, to be held in 
April 1924. Syllabuses and Questionnaires, on various aspects of 
the subject, have been issued and are being widely used. The 
basis of the Conference is “ The conviction that the Christian 
faith, rightly interpreted and consistently followed, gives the vision 
and the power essential for solving the problems of to-day, that 
the social ethics of Christianity have been greatly neglected by 
Christian people in their corporate capacity with disastrous con¬ 
sequences to the individual and to society, and that it is of the 
first importance that these should be given a clearer and more 
persistent emphasis.” The office of the Conference is at 92, St. 
George’s Square, London, S.W. 


64 



CHAPTER IV 

SHARING LIFE 


" Ye ought ... to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how 
He said. It is more blessed to give than to receive .”—Acts xx. 35. 


“ Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is 
in the power of thine hand to do it. Say not unto thy neighbour. 
Go, and come again, and to-morrow I will give; when thou hast it 
by thee .”—Proverbs iii. 27, 28. 

“ For every guest thy heart receiveth, the Lord Himself doth 
open in thy heart another room. It is as if Christ handed to us 
Himself the key of each newly discovered chamber, saying, * Let 
us together love to the best end the dear soul who enters here.’ . . . 
As love grows we discover further and further the capacity of the 
house of our soul. There is no limit to the number or kind of 
* these My brethren ’ to whom we give the freedom of this city 
without walls.”— Anon. 


“ A gentleman is a man who always tries to put in a little more 
than he takes out.”— Bernard Shaw. 


CHAPTER IV 


SHARING LIFE 

An attempt has been made, in the two previous 
chapters, to grasp something of the proportions and 
the perspective of the greatest of all human prob¬ 
lems—that of living together, in the same street, 
the same town, the same world. In order to see it 
the better we have stood back from the picture, 
viewing it in a somewhat detached, impersonal 
fashion. But, for anyone who wants to do some¬ 
thing with life, such an external view of human need 
must always be a preliminary to personal action. 
The critics in the clubs and advisers from armchairs 
familiar to all during the Great War illustrated an 
inveterate human complacency which likes to know, 
or seem to know, all about a problem or a battle 
without personally plunging into the fray. Such 
complacency is first cousin to the facility with which 
most men like to generalize, usually from very 
slender premises. It is, for instance, so easy, and so 
hopelessly fallacious, to think or talk about “ men 
in the mass.” There are no such people. “ No 
man,” an acute observer has remarked, “ is a mem¬ 
ber of the mob to himself; everyone leaves himself 
out of his generalizations.” 1 That is common 
1 A. Clutton Brock, Studies in Christianity , p. 165. 

67 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


sense, the lack of which would go far to vitiate any 
approach to this pressing problem of human living 
together. Nobody stands outside this complex 
business; we are all in it, with several and with 
joint responsibility for the evils that beset us; 
“ we are the Social Problem,’’ is the inevitable con¬ 
clusion of any group of serious-minded people who 
try to face this question in all its bearings. 1 And 
we, writer and readers of these words, are, each of us 
personally, deeply implicated; each of us has his 
or her personal contribution to make to the building 
up of a human society which shall approximate more 
closely to the ideal of the Kingdom. How exactly 
are we going to make it ? Something has already 
been said, in the first three chapters, about the work 
of personal Christianity in transforming the world 
of society and industry and politics. In this 
chapter an attempt is made to elucidate one 
particular aspect of the Christian contribution. 


I 

To the question, “ What am I to do ? ” the 
Christian answer is quite plain. It may be stated 
in three words: “ Share your life.” It has been 
already urged that the attaining of life and the shar¬ 
ing of it are two integral parts of one and the same 
process. It is the great paradox of Christianity, 
again and again insisted on by Jesus Christ and 
verified by all true experience, that you only realize 

1 Just as it was the actual conclusion of a group of Christians 
who met at Matlock with such a purpose thirteen years ago. 

68 


SHARING LIFE 


life in sharing it; “ life ” and “ love ” are almost 
interchangeable terms. 

Now it must be conceded that to care more for 
giving than for getting involves, for most of us, a 
very drastic change in one’s point of view. But 
such a “ conversion ” of motive and mental attitude 
is precisely what takes place when anyone has the 
humility and the wisdom—I had almost said the 
common-sense—to get his ideas from Jesus Christ. 
For no one can have any contact with Jesus Christ 
without making two discoveries, discoveries which 
rapidly affect the whole of his thinking and living. 
One is that the eternal God does really care about 
every single human being; they all matter to Him 
as individual personalities. And if we each of us, 
severally, are objects of God’s concern, then clearly 
we stand in a very wonderful relationship to one 
another, as being all of us within the magic circle 
of the Love of God. The other discovery—perhaps 
it would be truer to call it experience—which follows 
hard upon the heels of the first, is that such a know¬ 
ledge of God and such an attitude towards men 
must, and does, involve a shifting of life’s centre 
of gravity. It means a permanent displacement of 
self from the throne of being. It entails, in the 
language of to-day, a drastic alteration in one’s sense 
of values. It means, not a contracting or limiting or 
mutilating of life, but a radiant, passionate certainty 
that the fullness of life is only to be found in sharing 
and service and sacrifice. How indeed could it be 
otherwise with a religion which has the Cross at 
its very centre, which tells of a God “ who spared 
not His own Son but gave Him up for us all ” ? 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


“ Shall the disciple be above his Master ? 99 Are we 
to attempt to work out our vocation and destiny on 
easier and safer lines than those which were good 
enough for Jesus ? A simple fisherman once said to 
a friend of mine, “ I never calls God Lord” “ Why 
not ? ” asked my friend. “ Because Lords always 
have a lot of things and keep them and enjoy them; 
but God gives everything He’s got.” 

This fundamental thing in Christian experience 
cannot be too emphatically set forth; for it is so 
easily obscured on the one side, by that type of 
ultra-individualistic thought, not yet defunct, which 
sees “ salvation ” as a kind of private security from 
the dangers of this world and the next; and, on 
the other side, by an exaggerated asceticism which 
views sacrifice as an end in itself. The essential 
thing in “ salvation ” is that the man is saved from 
a life of selfishness into a life of love. “ Whatever 
spiritual experiences a man may have gone through, 
if he is not delivered from his self-regarding im¬ 
pulses, then he is not converted to the Christian 
position.” 1 “I sometimes think,” says another 
Christian of to-day, “ that Christ barely recognizes 
any sin except selfishness; and it is just there we 
are so utterly different, for selfishness is about the 
one sin we don’t recognize.” It is not so much a 
question of a conscious, almost artificial, “ mortify¬ 
ing ” of selfish instincts; it is rather that, in the 
company of Christ, you come to care for something 
not yourself, more than you care for yourself, to 
forget yourself altogether in the absorbing interests 
of His plans and His cause. The question He always 
1 A. H. Gray, 7 he Christian Adventure , p. 29. 

70 


SHARING LIFE 


asks of those who follow Him is what they are doing 
to share their life, and His sternest condemnation 
falls on those who fail to share it; those who, con¬ 
fronted by opportunities to help, thoughtlessly and 
uselessly, “ pass by on the other side.” 1 Mazzini is 
said to have remarked to a friend, on the subject of 
a religious reputation : “ When I hear a man called 
- good,’ I ask ‘ Who then has he saved ? 9 99 


II 

The genuine article in Christian unselfishness is 
not to be confused with a feeble, flabby sentiment 
of goodwill which never gets itself effectively ex¬ 
pressed in action, a “ love 99 which is directed to¬ 
wards everybody in general but does nothing for 
anybody in particular./ A story is told of an artist 
busy in his studio and thinking hard while he 
painted. The subject of the picture on his easel 
was a poor, thinly-clad woman, hugging a small 
child to her breast, and sorely battered by storm and 
tempest. Suddenly he flung down his brush, 
exclaiming to himself, “ Why don’t I go myself and 
help such folk, instead of just painting pictures of 
them ? ” He was as good as his word, and Alfred 
Tucker spent the rest of his life in the mission field, A 
the last twenty-five years of it as Bishop of Uganda, j 

I am far from suggesting that the mission field 
provides the only, or even the best, channel for 

1 See St. Matthew xxv. 31-46; St. Luke x. 25-37, xvi * 
19-31, xviii. 18-24; and see St. Matthew xxi. 30, for a vivid 
picture of well-intentioned uselessness. 

71 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 

Christian service; but I would venture to try and 
indicate, as plainly as possible, how life may be 
shared without any change of home or calling. We 
saw in the last chapter that there is a certain broad 
yet true distinction between “ life ” and its setting, 
between the essence of living and the conditions 
of living, between true spiritual vitality and the 
material environment which may choke it or cherish 
it. The Christian is called upon to share what he 
has of both. Take the external things first. Who has 
not read stories of Antarctic explorers making forced 
marches on very meagre rations, when the food, at 
meal-time, is carefully divided up, and it is a point 
of honour with each man not to have a crumb more 
than his fair share ? Now in this world, in a nation 
or a community, there are a certain amount of 
material things available, the things that make life 
reasonably satisfactory—food, clothes, houses and 
so on, and the means to obtain a sufficiency of leisure 
and of rational, healthy enjoyment. So long as 
there are vast numbers of fellow human beings, 
especially of fellow-citizens, who have not got any¬ 
thing like their fair share of these things, may it 
not be that a Christian—a true follower of Jesus 
and a true lover of his fellow-men—should make it a 
point of honour to refuse to have more than his 
fair share ? I do not doubt, indeed I know, that 
there are men and women who do possess a good 
deal more than their share, who are nevertheless 
sincere followers of Jesus Christ and endeavour to 
act as stewards of their wealth; it is not for one 
who is only a beginner in the school of Christ to 
judge them or to try and lay down the law for them. 

72 


SHARING LIFE 


And, further, I appreciate the very real difficulty of 
determining what is a “ fair share,” and the still 
graver difficulty, for the wealthy, of anything in the 
nature of an individual transfer of money either to 
other individuals or to the community. Neverthe¬ 
less, allowing for all such qualifications and despite 
every difficulty, it would seem to be the duty of an 
ordinary Christian (who “ means business ” by his 
Christianity) to content himself with such a standard 
of living as he can conscientiously reconcile with 
Christ’s law of love. “ We are polite enough,” says 
one who has earned the right to speak straightly 
about these things, 1 “ we are polite enough to 
surrender our seat in a ’bus to any weaker person, 
but rarely our seat in the saddle of wealth and 
privilege. Convention gives us each our place and 
advantage, and we have tried to argue that God 
meant us each to keep our seats in the world’s 
omnibus, trusting that He would make other 
people’s standing and pushing congenial to them. 
In that great tract of living we have abandoned the 
idea of loving our neighbour as ourself, covering 
ourselves forsooth with the theological defence of 
caring more for our brother’s soul than for his 
body.” 

It may be that not all Christians are called to this 
adventure of “ voluntary equality ” in the standard 
of living; though it can hardly be doubted that our 
social system stands in sore need of some such 
practical demonstration of Christian brotherhood. 

1 Malcolm Spencer, The Social Function of the Churchy p. 72. 
See also his remarks on “ The voluntary practice of equality,” 
pp. 145 f. 


73 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


In any case, within the framework of life as we find 
it, there are hundreds of different ways in which 
those who want to share things can find ways to do 
so, ways that range from the myriad little details of 
daily intercourse to participation in large and com¬ 
plex efforts to make the means of life available for 
all. Every man who means to share and to serve 
will, each morning, take a fresh look at his ideal— 
“ not to be ministered unto but to minister ”... 
“ last of all and servant of all ” . . . “ more blessed 
to give than to receive; ” and he will look at his 
Master, too, to take in a new stock of hope and 
courage; and then he will plunge recklessly and 
cheerily into a day of “ sharing.” Grumpiness 
at breakfast is a gloomy privilege he will leave to 
the pagans. In all the give-and-take of family life 
he will do plenty of giving, and that, too, without 
any of the rather priggish, obtrusive unselfishness 
which makes other people uncomfortable. “ Let us 
love one another and laugh ” is a capital motto for 
family life; as a savour of selfless giving a jest is 
better than a text. As Robert Louis Stevenson 
said, “ A happy man or woman is a better thing to 
find than a five-pound note.” And then in all the 
traffic of common intercourse, in the street, in the 
’bus, in the shop, in the office, in the work-room 
or on the playing-fields, it will be for such a man 
a never-ending delight, like a little secret game 
played with himself, to devise all sorts of ways in 
which to carry out his “ sharing ” scheme. Here 
is a true instance, from the world of commerce, of 
Christian sharing. (A young man had been in a 
responsible position with a firm of large timber 
74 


SHARING LIFE 


merchants. Presently he left and started in the 
business for himself, to a considerable extent in 
opposition to his old employer. In the very midst, 
however, of a very flourishing period, with many 
contracts in hand, a serious fire destroyed the young 
man’s stock of timber. He was faced by the most 
pressing anxiety, for it meant possible ruin. Just 
at that time he saw, one day, his old master coming 
towards his office. He said afterwards that he could 
have hated him, because he thought he was come to 
gloat over his misfortunes. But it was as a friend 
that he came. He said, “ I know that you are 
bound to supply timber to your customers by a cer¬ 
tain date; and this unfortunate fire will make it 
impossible for you to do this. But my yard is at 
your disposal. You may have what timber you need 
and pay me at your convenience.” / But the kind 
of things that can be done by those who mean to do 
them are legion, and quite beyond the compass of 
any telling. And the opportunities to give come to 
all who look for them, whether they have much or 
little of this world’s goods. Indeed it is proverbial 
that those who have less are the more generous in 
sharing it, often with a truly beautiful delicacy of 
perception. I heard of an old lady who lived in a 
wee house in the country who was found planting 
her best roses in the back garden. When reasoned 
with she nodded her head towards an upper window 
in a small house, and said, “ I’m going to put some 
geraniums here too. I know they’ll be almost out 
of sight of our house, but there’s a woman sits all 
day sewing at that window, so tired-looking, and 
maybe the flowers will brighten her up a bit.” 

75 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


Neither home-life nor working-life, with all the 
various relationships which each involves, will 
exhaust the opportunities for sharing life. All sorts 
of avenues of service open up before the man who 
is in earnest about “ every-day religion.” To insert 
a lever under the mountainous mass of world misery 
and need, and raise it even a few inches, will demand 
all the concentrated, co-ordinated energy of faith and 
love that any given generation is able to supply. 
And in this organized effort it is for every Christian 
man and woman to find their place and do their part. 
The missionary enterprise, at home and overseas, 
the various branches of social service, the many forms 
of “ Church work ”—all these activities are integral 
parts of the one great endeavour to bring “ life ” to 
those who lack it, and in all of them there is an 
increasing demand for an unlimited number of 
willing helpers. Men and women are wanted who 
will do small things—yes and dull things!—with a 
large heart and for the sake of a great purpose. 
There are plenty of people, someone has said, who 
will cheerfully die for a cause, but if you ask them 
to teach a Sunday School class they will go away in 
a rage! In bringing this section of our subject to 
a close, three practical suggestions, obvious indeed 
but sometimes neglected, may be humbly proffered 
to any who are trying to share life, through organized 
effort or in other ways. First, keep all relationships 
very human, and free from the blight of officialism 
or professionalism. Secondly, develop the knack of 
seeing the good in other people, and building on it. 1 

1 In personal relationships “ there is only one attitude com¬ 
patible with self-respect; namely, to find out and hoard like grains 
76 


SHARING LIFE 


Thirdly, find the way to make real friends with 
some family or some person who lives and works in 
some other social stratum than that in which you 
have been born and bred. It is a plan which opens 
the eyes, and helps you to know what “ fellowship ” 
may really mean. 


Ill 

What has been said thus far about “ sharing ” is, 
however, only half the tale. For, in the last resort, 
of all that any man can give that which is most 
worth giving is himself. He is summoned to share 
not only the husk but the kernel of living, not only 
that which can be seen and handled and measured, 
but that inner life of the spirit, that fount of true 
being, which, however imponderable, invisible, 
indefinable, is none the less the most vital and 
precious thing he has. I can conceive of a man 
who has a strict conscience about his money and 
material possessions and who is a laborious supporter 
of philanthropic enterprises, and yet somehow the 
total amount of his real contribution to the common 
good remains small. I can imagine another, with 
next to nothing of material worth to give, and 
hindered, perhaps, by ill-health or other circum¬ 
stance from much active “ service,’’ who neverthe¬ 
less, through the sheer quality of his inner living 


of gold all that is fine and generous and lovable in others, and do 
our best to find something in ourselves worthy of being matched 
with it.” (E. F. Benson, The Osbornes.) 

77 



EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


and through a quickened ability to communicate 
that quality, does more to supply the needs of his 
fellow-men than the first. 

If this is so, it raises a very vital question for 
everyone who seeks to be true to his stewardship. 
What about the quality of life behind one’s giving ? 
What about the inner personality which must of 
necessity express itself in all outward contact with 
other people, and which is ultimately, according to 
its character, either the curse or the saving of human 
living together ? For the musician who sings or 
plays in public it is not enough to spend hours in 
daily practice and so produce a faultless technique; 
his real success as an artist depends on the very soul 
of music within him. “ Behind all his technique,” 
says a shrewd musical critic, “ it is his life which 
is speaking to the lives of those who listen to him, 
and the question is not whether he can sing or play 
this or that difficult thing, but whether he has 
passed enough music through his mind for a very 
simple thing to go straight home.” What is true 
of art is true of life. Keep the thought, the soul, 
the deepest springs of life pure and fresh and vital¬ 
ized, and then you have something to share which 
is worth sharing, r What a man thinks, and makes 
with thinking, is the real thing . . . action is merely 
delayed thinking. J Mind moulds matter very slowly, 
but then nothing else moulds it at all.” 

It is easy, and common, for an Englishman with 
all a Northerner’s cult of sheer energy, to commit 
the supreme folly of neglecting the cultivation of the 
inner life. 1 Such neglect is intelligible in those 
1 On this subject see, further, Chapter XII. 

78 


SHARING LIFE 


whose notions are half pagan, or whose lives, perhaps 
through no fault of their own, receive no impress 
from religion or education. But it is inexcusable, 
nay tragic, that those who are looked to as leaders 
in moral and spiritual things should allow their own 
true life to become choked and swamped by absorp¬ 
tion in organization, and the quality of it to wilt 
and wither through sheer lack of spiritual air and 
nourishment. “ You give me the impression,” said 
a candid friend to a hard-working parson, “ less of a 
‘ collected Galilaean 9 than of an under-staffed 
American office.” Apt characterization of the 
scamper and rush of many of our lives! “ You 

have lived,” says a character in a very beautiful 
book, 1 “ you have lived here five years, but lived 
too heavily . Care has swamped imagination. I did 
the same, in the City for twenty years. It’s all 
wrong. One has to learn to live carelessly as well 
as carefully. When I came here I felt astray at first, 
but now I see more clearly. The peace and beauty 
have soaked into me. . . .” And to quote Ruskin’s 
true and noble declaration : “ The more I think of 
it, I find this conclusion more impressed upon me— 
that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in 
this world is to see something, and tell what it saw 
in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for 
one who can think; but thousands can think for 
one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, 
and religion—all in one.”/ Only those can “ see ” 
who will make the time ajrcl opportunity to be alone, 
and who will spend that solitude in the company 
of Jesus. With Him is the Well of Life, and from 

1 A Prisoner in Fairyland , by Algernon Blackwood. 

79 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


no other source shall one find adequate replenish¬ 
ment for the very springs of all living. 

“ Give us this day our daily bread, we pray, 

And give us likewise, Lord, our daily thought, 

That our poor souls may strengthen as they ought, 

And starve not on the husks of yesterday.” 

And, let it be clearly emphasized, the motive and 
purpose of such life renewal has nothing whatever to 
do with a sort of exotic soul culture ; the purpose is, 
simply, that what is thus won may be continually 
shared. And shared it can be, with startling 
results; for, as all recent psychology goes to show, 
such deep interpenetration of human personalities 
is one of the most remarkable, and most clearly 
established, facts of our human nature. You cannot 
limit your spiritual outgoings even if you would; 
what you are , in the uttermost recesses of your real 
being, is always reaching out and affecting, for good 
or ill, the inner and the outer lives of other personal¬ 
ities. It is not too much to say that “ the real world 
forces are not things, but thoughts. Every move¬ 
ment, for good or for evil, starts as a thought in 
someone’s mind; a thought which gets hold of him 
and shapes him, and, through him, gets hold of 
others and shapes them too.” 1 And, to cite 
Algernon Blackwood once again : “ The sources of 
our life lie hid with beauty, very very far away, 
and our real big, continuous life is spiritual—out of 
the body, as I shall call it. The waking-day life 
uses what it can bring over from this enormous 
under-running sea of universal consciousness where 

1 E. A. Burroughs, World Builders , p. 31. 

80 


SHARING LIFE 


we’re all together, splendid, free, untamed, and 
where thinking is creation and we know each other 
face to face ... all linked together by thought as 
stars are by their rays.” 1 

“ Now sinks to sleep the clamour of the day 
And, million-footed, from the Milky Way, 

Falls shyly on my heart the world’s lost thought— 

Shower of primrose dust the stars have taught 
To haunt each sleeping mind, 

Till it may find 

A garden in some eager, passionate brain 
That, rich in loving-kindness as in pain, 

Shall harvest it, then scatter forth again 
Its garnered loveliness from heaven caught. 

Oh, every yearning thought that holds a tear, 

Yet finds no mission, 

And lies untold, 

Waits, guarded in that labyrinth of gold,— 

To reappear 

Upon some perfect night, 

Deathless—not old— 

But sweet with time and distance, 

And clothed as in a vision 
Of starry brilliance, 

For the world’s delight.” 2 

In the light of such facts as these Christian pray¬ 
ing takes on a new significance. If anyone should 
ask, How can I effectively share the very best and 
highest experience that may be mine ? I should 
unhesitatingly answer, Learn to pray—and in the 
school of Jesus Christ. What after all is prayer but 
the communication of Life-force from man to man 

1 A Prisoner in Fairyland , p. 313 . 

2 Ibid . 


G 


8 l 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


through God ? Prayer, in its essence, is not the 
preferring of this or that particular petition, it 
is the opening of the whole heart and mind to 
the incoming of the love and energy of God, it 
is a deliberate taking hold of the life of God not 
only for myself and my own profound needs, but 
also, through a kind of vicarious receptiveness, for 
the needs of other human personalities with 
whom I am consciously or subconsciously linked. 
No wonder Jesus Christ said the most startling 
things about prayer and its possibilities. 1 And 
when you note what He said, and when you con¬ 
sider what might be accomplished by praying 
(in the sense in which Jesus meant it), you stand 
amazed at the common neglect of this most potent 
instrument. The possibilities of service, of “ shar¬ 
ing,” are soon exhausted unless they can run out 
along these boundless spiritual lines. Love can 
never be satisfied with giving things ; it must give 
self, and life; yea, all that it has of joy and glory, 
of Christ Himself, these it must give, with open 
hands and overflowing heart. Such, at its height, 
is the ministry of sharing, a ministry which lies 
within the competence of every common Christian, 
a ministry which belongs to the very essence of 
“ every-day religion.” The deepest need of all men 
everywhere is, quite simply, their need of Jesus 
Christ: all that He stands for, all that He can bring 
to them. The greatest service that any man can 
render his fellows is to share with them all that he 
has of Jesus Christ. 

1 Cf., for example, St. Mark xi. 22-24; St. Luke xi. 1—13. 

82 


SHARING LIFE 


“ I said, 4 Let me walk in the fields; * 

He said, 4 Nay, walk in the town; * 

I said, 4 There are no flowers there; * 

He said, 4 No flowers but a crown.’ 

I said, 4 But the sky is black, 

There is nothing but noise and din; * 

But He wept as He sent me back— 

4 There is more,’ He said, 4 there is sin.* 

I said, 4 But the air is thick 
And fogs are veiling the sun; * 

He answered, 4 Yet souls are sick, 

And souls in the dark undone.* 

I said, 4 1 shall miss the light, 

And friends will miss me, they say; ’ 

He answered me, 4 Choose to-night 
If I am to miss you, or they.’ 

I pleaded for time to be given; 

He said, 4 Is it hard to decide ? 

It will not seem hard in heaven 
To have followed the steps of your guide.* 

I cast one look at the fields, 

Then set my face to the town : 

He said : 4 My child, do you yield ? 

Will you leave the flowers for the crown ? * 

Then into His hand went mine, 

And into my heart came He, 

And I walk in a light divine 
The path I had feared to see.” 

George Macdonald. 


83 



















CHAPTER V 

CHRISTIANITY AND WORK 


“ My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish 
His work.”— St. John iv. 34. 

“ Blessed is the man who has found his work, let him ask no 
other blessedness.”— Carlyle. 

" Life without industry is sin, and industry without art 
brutality.”— Ruskin. 

“ And this is my way o’ looking at it: there’s the sperrit o’ God 
in all things and all times—week-day as well as Sunday—and 
i’ the great works and inventions, and i’ the figuring and the 
mechanics. And God helps us with our head-pieces and our hands 
as well as with our souls : and if a man does bits o’ jobs out o’ 
working hours—builds a oven for ’s wife to save her from going 
to the bake-house, or scrats at his bit o’ garden and makes two 
potatoes grow instead o’ one, he’s doing more good, and he’s just 
as near to God, as if he was running after some preacher and 
a-praying and a-groaning.”— George Eliot (Adam Bede). 


“ When I work for myself and live for myself, I exhaust myself, 
but when I work for others, wisely and well, I work for God also; 
and for my work I get that bread which cometh down from 
heaven.”— Collyer. 


CHAPTER V 


CHRISTIANITY AND WORK 

There is a story, from Victorian times, about 
Lord Palmerston and his comment on a certain 
sermon which he happened to hear. The preacher 
(who, it may be, was somewhat ahead of his time) 
dealt straightly with some aspects of “ every-day 
religion ” ; and Lord Palmerston, as he left the 
church, was heard muttering to himself, “ Things 
have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed 
to invade the sphere of private life.” 

The whole argument of the present book is that 
religion—the Christian religion—is intended to 
invade the sphere both of private and of public life, 
and that in proportion as it fails to do so, those who 
profess it have missed its true spirit and meaning. 
In the last three chapters some attempt has been 
made to examine the relevance of Christianity to 
some of the human relationships in which men find 
themselves, both as groups and as individuals. In 
the present chapter I propose to see what Christian¬ 
ity has to say to that which bulks largest in the lives 
of most men and women, namely, their work. 

I 

It was argued in the first chapter that the true 
sphere for a man’s expression of his Christianity is 
87 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


the petty round of common life, and not special 
activities of a “ religious ” character. The butcher, 
the baker, the candlestick-maker, the ploughboy and 
the publican, the merchant and the mechanic, need 
not go outside the shop, the farm or the factory 
to express and exhibit the Spirit of Christ. The 
mother with a home to make and children to bring up 
has as fine a sphere for God-like work as any human 
being could desire. Indeed, if anyone wants to be a 
true Christian his ordinary daily work is the place 
at which to begin the experiment. Christianity has 
always proclaimed the duty and dignity of work. 
Ever since man began to form any true picture of 
God, he has realized, with growing clearness, that 
God has made him for activity and not for idle¬ 
ness. “ Six days shalt thou labour and do all that 
thou hast to do.” As a right and normal thing, 
“ man goeth forth to his work and to his labour 
until the evening.” Jesus labouring as a carpenter 
in the shop at Nazareth makes work, for all time, 
indispensable to true manhood. He found, and 
showed, God in common work. Was it His own 
experience of years of plough-making for His fellow- 
villagers which elicited the saying, preserved on an 
Egyptian papyrus and more than possibly genuine, 
“ Raise the stone and thou shalt find me, cleave the 
wood and there am I ” ? Unremitting labour for 
the benefit of others He knew to be characteristic 
of the life of God and of all God-like men—“ My 
Father worketh hitherto, and I work. ...” 1 
And the early Christians caught His idea of the 
dignity of work. The mystic secret of their new 
1 St. John v. 17. 

88 


CHRISTIANITY AND WORK 


life, with its initiation into new realms of love and 
joy and peace, did not exempt them from humdrum 
daily toil. Whatever spiritual ecstasy, as a Christian, 
a man might or might not experience, he certainly 
had, as a Christian, to earn his bread and butter, 
and to help others to earn theirs. St. Paul is very 
emphatic about this. Whatever his obligations and 
preoccupations as a preacher and a missionary, he 
insists on earning his own living by working at his 
own trade, that of a tent-maker; and he is very 
severe on people who seem to think that, as Chris¬ 
tians, they are excused from unremitting effort to 
support themselves—“ if a man will not work, he 
shah not eat.” 1 It is curious to reflect how long the 
tradition survived (the Great War dealt it a heavy 
blow) that to work with your hands, or to work too 
hard at anything, is not quite consistent with the 
dignity of a “ gentleman.” Christianity, on the 
other hand (and it ought to know something about 
“ gentle men ”), makes it exceedingly plain that you 
cannot be a gentleman if you don’t work, and work 
hard too. It is to the credit of the new genera¬ 
tion that, in this matter, it has more sympathy 
with Christianity than with nineteenth-century 
snobbishness. 

A duty to work necessarily implies the right to 
work; and these words are written at a time 2 when 
there are terribly large numbers of men and women, 
in our own land and elsewhere, who are more than 
willing to work but for whom no work can be found. 
This serious state of affairs is partly due to the com¬ 
plexity of modern society and industry, in which 
1 2 Thessalonians iii. io. 2 January 1922. 


89 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


practically all work is interdependent; partly to the 
disastrous economic consequences of the war (and 
the “ Peace ”). I will not attempt here any dis¬ 
cussion of the large and intricate question of 
unemployment . 1 Suffice it only to say, before passing 
on to other aspects of religion and work, that 
Christianity is as deeply concerned with “ the right 
to work ” as with such a question as that of “ the 
living wage ”; and to note, with satisfaction, that 
every civilized community has by now come to 
recognize its obligation to assist its members to 
exercise their right to work, and its responsibility, 
in the last resort, to keep them alive when there is 
no work to be had. 


II 

I remember, in rowing days, watching an old 
boat-builder at work upon the frail shell of a racing 
eight. With infinite pains and with the unerring 
skill born of a lifetime’s experience he handled his 
tools ; and as he bent over his work, and the delicate 
cedar-wood craft took shape under his hands, the 
intent look on his face and the whole pose of his 
body seemed to suggest a profound, if unconscious, 
satisfaction in what he was doing. No doubt he was 
satisfied; for work, useful work, into which a man 
can throw not simply his skill but himself , is as 
necessary to human nature as food and air and love. 
It is a very deep-down instinct in man which bids 
him make things and put himself into their making. 
“ Produce ! Produce ! ” cries Carlyle in character- 
1 It was dealt with, by implication, in Chapter III. 

90 


CHRISTIANITY AND WORK 


istic language. “ Were it but the pitifullest, infini¬ 
tesimal fraction of a product, produce it in God’s 
name ! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with 
it then. Up ! Up ! ” Creative work is part of life 
itself; that which is not expressed dies. And all 
the good work in the world is done in obedience to 
this instinct. Whether it is boats that you make, 
or tables, or houses, or clothes, or books, or motor¬ 
cars ; whether it is thoughts, or words, or figures,‘or 
speeches, or lectures, or sermons; or whether your 
“ work ” is to assist, at some point, in the vast 
intricate process of supplying human need—what¬ 
ever you make or do for men’s bodies or men’s 
minds, the success of the making, as well as the joy 
of it, will depend upon your putting into it the very 
best stuff that is in you. Your job, paid or unpaid, 
asks for the best you have. 

Now work like this is sacred. God is concerned in 
it. When a man puts his highest self into his work 
he puts a bit of God into it. There is a real sense 
in which the Spirit of God “ inspires ” a good 
carpenter or architect or engineer, just as He may 
be said to “ inspire ” a teacher or writer or preacher. 
The Hebrews, very early in their history, got hold 
of this thought of God being “ in ” good workman¬ 
ship. “ And Moses said unto the children of Israel, 
See, the Lord hath called by name Bezaleel the son 
of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah ; and 
he hath filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, 
in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all 
manner of workmanship; and to devise curious 
works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, 
and in the cutting of stones, to set them, and in 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


carving of wood, to make any manner of cunning 
work. And he hath put in his heart that he may 
teach, both he and Aholiab, the son of Ahisamach, 
of the tribe of Dan. Them hath he filled with 
wisdom of heart, to work all manner of work, of the 
engraver, and of the cunning workman, and of the 
embroiderer, in blue, and in purple, in scarlet, and 
in fine linen, and of the weaver, even of them that 
do any work, and of those that devise cunning work. 
Then wrought Bezaleel and Aholiab, and every wise 
hearted man, in whom the Lord put wisdom and 
understanding to know how to work all manner of 
work for the service of the sanctuary, according to 
all that the Lord had commanded.” 1 

In modern times, a singularly beautiful expression 
of this same idea is to be found in George Eliot’s 
poem Stradivarius , “ the gist of which is that God 
Himself might conceivably make better fiddles than 
Stradivari’s, but by no means certainly; since, as a 
fact, God orders his best fiddles of Stradivari.” 2 
Says the great workman : 

“ ‘ God be praised, 

Antonio Stradivari has an eye 

That winces at false work and loves the true. 

With hand and arm that play upon the tool 

As willingly a3 any singing bird 

Sets him to sing his morning roundelay, 

Because he likes to sing and likes the song.* 

Then Naldo : ‘ *Tis a pretty kind of fame 
At best, that comes of making violins; 

And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go 
To purgatory none the less.* 

1 Exodus xxxv. 30 ff. 

2 Sir A. Quiller-Couch, The Art of Reading , p. 15. 

92 



CHRISTIANITY AND WORK 


But he: 

‘ ’Twere purgatory here to make them ill; 

And for my fame—when any master holds 
’Twixt chin and hand a violin of mine, 

He will be glad that Stradivari lived, 

Made violins, and made them of the best. 

The Masters only know whose work is good: 

They will choose mine, and while God gives them skill 
I give them instruments to play upon, 

God choosing me to help Him.’ 

‘ What! were God 
At fault for violins, thou absent ? 9 

‘Yes; 

He were at fault for Stradivari’s work.* 

‘ Why, many hold Giuseppe’s violins 
As good as thine.’ 

‘ May be : they are different. 

His quality declines: he spoils his hand 
With over-drinking. But were his the best, 

He could not work for two. My work is mine, 

And, heresy or not, if my hand slacked 
I should rob God—since He is fullest good— 

Leaving a blank instead of violins. 

I say, not God Himself can make man’s best 
Without best men to help Him. . . . 

’Tis God gives skill, 

But not without men’s hands: He could not make 

Antonio Stradivari’s violins 

Without Antonio. Get thee to thy easel ! 9 ” 

So do work and character intertwine. And 
Christianity, concerned so profoundly with what a 
man is and may become, is of necessity concerned 
with what he does, and what he makes, and how he 
works. 

At this point a serious difficulty must be faced. 
Granted that some form of creative work (that is, 
work that offers fair scope for skill and self-expression) 

93 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


is desirable for all, how many, in fact, have the 
opportunity to perform such work ? What pro¬ 
portion of the men and women in modern civilized 
communities have work to do that makes any real 
demand upon the creative faculties that are in them ? 
I write these words at the end of a working day. 
How many hundreds of thousands of “ workers ” in 
England have spent to-day standing by a machine, 
pulling a handle or working a treadle—not “ making ” 
anything, but watching a machine make some 
minute part of something—the point of a pin, the 
thread of a screw, the head of a nail. I think of the 
girls in the spinning-rooms of the Lancashire cotton 
mills, working ten hours a day at a monotonous and 
mechanical task. Are all these going home this 
evening with any sense of difficult work skilfully 
done, of exacting labour that has demanded, and 
received, their best ? Or, if they think of the work 
at all as the hours of welcome release begin, would 
they not dismiss it with a shrug of boredom, or even 
a gesture of resentment—“ same old shop, same old 
machine, same old foreman ! ” “ Take from man,” 
says J. M. Beck, Solicitor-General of the United 
States, “ take from man the opportunity of work 
and the sense of pride in achievement, and you have 
taken from him the very life of his existence. Robert 
Burns could sing as he drove his ploughshare through 
the fields of Ayr. To-day millions, who simply 
watch an automatic infallible machine, which 
requires neither strength nor skill, do not sing at 
their work, but many curse the fate which has 
chained them like Ixion to a soulless machine.” 1 
1 Fortnightly Review , November 1921. 

94 


CHRISTIANITY AND WORK 


No wonder Ruskin and William Morris, in the 
middle of the nineteenth century, turned in revolt 
against the modern industrial system and its slavery 
to machinery. It is a question whether they hated 
most the deadly soullessness of its methods or the 
devastating ugliness of its products. They rebelled 
against “ the nature of the work which in our time 
most poor men have to do. Morris believed that 
their work was joyless as it had never been before; 
and that, not poverty, was to him the peculiar evil 
of our time against which, as a workman himself, he 
rebelled and wished the poor to rebel.” 1 

This deep dissatisfaction with the joyless work of 
much modern industry, which Ruskin and Morris 
were the first to express, has since become far more 
acute and widespread. But it is easier to describe 
the disease than to indicate the remedy. For the 
mischief is deep-rooted; it lies, as Morris clearly saw, 
in the “ values ” of the civilization of our day. An 
industrial system which is more concerned with 
profit than with “ use ” is sure to produce ugliness, 
and to lose its own soul into the bargain. As Morris 
says, “ a society which worships riches will express 
its idolatry even in its table-legs and chandeliers.” 
The only remedy is a change of values; but a change 
of values requires a change of heart. And a change 
of heart, as many will agree, is a stubborn operation 
which demands a deep dynamic force such as only 
Christianity can produce. 

It is not suggested that such a change of mind, 
with resulting changes of method, would, or should, 

1 Clutton Brock, William Morris: His Work and Influence , 

p. 20. 


95 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


abolish modern dependence on machinery. We 
clearly cannot cancel the mechanical discoveries of 
the last century or two, and go back to a world in 
which everything is made by hand. But we can, 
and must, make machinery our servant and cease to 
let it be our master. We are only beginning to 
learn how to use it. It is, after all, only 150 years 
since Watts patented the steam-engine, whereas man 
has been on this earth some half-million years and 
presumably has much of his schooling still in front of 
him. It is safe to prophesy that, unless civilization 
is foolish enough to allow its best thought to be 
continually sterilized by war and preparation for 
war, even fifty years will witness an enormous 
advance in the subordination of machinery to 
humanity. “ Machines,” writes one who dreams 
dreams, “ far more efficient and requiring far less 
attention than any we yet possess, will do all the 
heavy work of carrying, driving, lifting, hammering, 
and so on; machines will produce the scientific 
appliances, etc., that are beyond the power of our 
clumsy fingers; and machines will prepare multi¬ 
tudes of goods that might be called the raw material 
of civilized life—rough, unfinished things—articles in 
what are the early stages of manufacture; upon 
these men will work, and make as much of their 
houses and gardens and clothes and meals as they 
desire, putting art and individuality into everything 
about them.” 1 

And as we become more enlightened we shall, no 
doubt, devise further means for the humanizing of 

1 Life's Adventure , Adult School Lesson Handbook for 1920, 
p. 130. 

96 


CHRISTIANITY AND WORK 


industry, 1 for bringing into all work larger and more 
satisfying scope for personality. For instance, in 
the ideal community, we should surely find ways to 
render harmless trades which are at present danger¬ 
ous to those who work in them. 2 Also, where tasks 
necessary to the community are particularly exhaust¬ 
ing or repellent, they should be compensated by 
increased leisure or lightened by some method of 
variation. Why should not I, a parson, every now 
and again leave my desk and my pulpit, and take 
my turn at cleaning out the sewers or going round 
with the refuse cart ? 


Ill 

It may be some time before public opinion de¬ 
mands, and secures, any large readjustment of work 
and function in our complex industrial system. 
Meanwhile, at any rate for the majority of those 
into whose hands this book is likely to fall, there is 
little to prevent that Christianizing of motive and 
outlook which can charge all work with a new mean¬ 
ing, a new zest, a new delight. The man who is 
learning to look at life from the side of Jesus Christ, 
and to shape his practice accordingly, will find in his 
daily work the first and nearest field for his Christian 
experimenting. Whether or not he is moved by 
the aesthetic ideals of a Morris or a Ruskin, he will 
simply, for Christ’s sake, come to hate all work that 
is slack and slovenly and mechanical; for Christ’s 

1 Cf. above, p. 56 f. 

2 Consumption is rife among potters and textile workers. 

H 97 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


sake he will put into his common every-day toil 
the very best creative capacity that is in him (and 
he will be surprised to find how much that is). It is 
striking to notice the kind of “ extra ” things that 
happen when a human life feels the touch of Jesus 
Christ. He does so much more than turn the 
atheist into a church-goer; He makes the cad a 
gentleman, the slacker a good workman, the phili¬ 
stine a lover of the beautiful. I recall hearing a 
story of a man who went to visit a clergyman and 
said he wanted to be instructed in Christianity. 
The clergyman was rather surprised (such inquirers 
do not, unfortunately, form the majority of most 
parsons’ daily callers), and asked what brought his 
questioner on such an errand. Had he been to a 
religious meeting, or listened to some sermon that 
impressed him ? No, he said, it was nothing of that 
kind. “ The truth is, sir,” he said, “ it’s to do 
with the foreman of the place where I work. What 
strikes me is the way he treats us chaps, and the 
way he does his work, and I’ve just heard that he is 
a Christian. If he’s a Christian, then I’d like to be 
one too.” \ 

Further, the man who tries to bring Christianity 
into his work will do it as his service to the com¬ 
munity. He will make bricks, or drive a ’bus, or 
mend boots, or sell socks, not in the first instance 
for the money he can get thereby, but in order to 
help supply the needs of his fellow-men. There is 
something wrong with himself or with his work 
unless he can enjoy in his labours something of this 
sense of useful purpose. His work should be his 
“ vocation ” : that which he is “ called ” to do 
98 


CHRISTIANITY AND WORK 


for the benefit of his fellows and for the Kingdom 
of God. Some occupations and activities—those, 
for instance, of burglars and bogus company- 
promoters—clearly fall outside this definition. And 
about certain others I must confess to grave mis¬ 
givings, such as bookmakers, money-lenders, and 
certain types of play-producers and film-producers 
—any, in fact, who make a living by preying on the 
weaknesses of or appealing to the animal in their 
fellow human beings. But, ruling these out and 
making all allowance for the industrial difficulties 
referred to above, there still remains a vast field of 
human labour in which a man can do his work for 
Christ and with Christ. Those last words are 
intended literally. To the Christian, as he works, 
belongs the intense joy of knowing that all his best 
labour, and the spirit he puts into it, are winning 
the approval of the Master Workman by his side. 
This deep certainty will sometimes flash across his 
consciousness, and irradiate the details of his daily 
task. “ The man of romance,” Rostand has said, 
“ is not he whose existence is diversified by the 
greatest possible number of extraordinary events, 
but he in whom the simplest occurrences produce 
the most live sensations.” Rostand is right. Both 
work and play take on new zest, new savour, when 
you share them with Him who is the “ Unseen 
Playmate,” the Friend of all, the Elder Brother of 
humanity. 

If, then, true work is “ service,” he who wants to 
serve his generation will take pains to find out what 
is the best service he can render, and will try to 
avoid merely drifting into any job that happens 
99 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


to present itself. If, through education or other 
circumstances, he has any special gift or capacities 
to offer, he will not suffer his area of choice to be 
less wide than the world. He will remember that, 
generally speaking, the need, of human beings,— 
physical, mental and spiritual—is greater in Asia 
and Africa than it is in England, 1 and he will bear 
this in mind in choosing his “ vocation ” ; and, if he 
is young and strong, he will be specially drawn to 
those people and places where the need is greatest, 
the life hardest, and the joy of selfless, adventurous 
service most assured. 


IV 

This chapter may close with a word to “ religious 
workers. 5 ’ I dislike the phrase, and only use it as a 
convenient way to describe those who spend all 
their time and energies in what is usually called 
“ religious 55 or “ social 55 work and receive a wage 
for their labours. If the argument of this book is 
sound, then the cobbler putting his best skill into 
mending shoes and doing it as his service to men and 
to God is doing “ Christian work 55 as truly as the 
Archbishop of Canterbury. The difference between 
them lies in the area, scope and complexity of the 
service rendered. It is true that “ religious 55 work 

1 It is not possible within the limits of this book to say any¬ 
thing in detail about the present needs and opportunities of the 
missionary enterprise. First-rate and up-to-date literature on the 
subject may be obtained from the Student Movement and from 
the chief missionary societies. 


ioo 


CHRISTIANITY AND WORK 


does usually involve contact with other people in 
the deepest and most vital regions of human living. 
It is, therefore, by its nature, work peculiarly rich 
in opportunity, heavy with responsibility, and at¬ 
tended by considerable perils and pitfalls. Indeed 
there are many in our day who are questioning the 
desirability of any persons being wholly cut off from 
“ secular ” avocations and entirely set apart to 
“ religious” work. To discuss this point would 
carry us beyond the scope of this chapter and book. 
Here I will only set down one or two considera¬ 
tions which, as it appears to me, ought frequently 
to engage the attention of parsons, parish workers, 
organizers, secretaries and staff-workers of missionary 
and other Church societies, and other people in 
secretarial or administrative posts which exist to 
promote religious aims. 

However obvious, it must be said—and perhaps 
needs to be said—that the first duty of the “ religi¬ 
ous ” worker, as of every other worker, is to put his 
best into his work, and to go on doing that all the 
time. “ Tell him never to look at the clock! ” said 
Edison, the inventor, to someone who asked him 
what advice he should give to a young friend just 
launching on a career. And the diligence must 
be an orderly diligence. The ends of the Kingdom, 
as the objective of an army, are not served by bad 
staff-work. The chaos of this parson’s writing- 
table, or the slovenliness of that society’s office, or 
the financial methods of that Church, must be 
enough to make angels weep—or laugh ! For many 
a religious worker the discipline of work—discipline 
as to time, quality and method—must be self- 

IOI 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


imposed if it is imposed at all. And undisciplined 
work is a third-best offering to make in such a 
service. 

But, secondly, systematic industry must always be 
clearly and consciously related to a Purpose. Idle¬ 
ness has been defined as activity without purpose. 
Which gives rise to the reflection that there must 
be a great many idle as well as unemployed in Eng¬ 
land to-day. It is so easy to become the slave of 
your own industry, the prisoner of your own organ¬ 
ization, and to forget that the only point of all work 
is more life. It is a pathetic sign—and it is a suffi¬ 
ciently frequent sight in the Churches and religious 
societies—to see people wearing themselves out 
with exacting toil, and all the time they give you 
the impression of being so utterly immersed in 
working the machine as to have quite forgotten 
what the machinery is for. Along that road a man 
may become hard, mechanical, groovy, professional. 
And those are not qualities that create life, or com¬ 
mend Christ. Spiritual ends demand spiritual 
means; they require agents who can master and 
not be mastered by the machinery they must use. 

There is no space here to discuss the many fine 
qualities which can be and often are brought to 
this difficult service. Two only will I name as this 
chapter closes. One is the power to work along¬ 
side other people cheerfully, patiently, and with a 
sympathetic loyalty that makes misunderstanding 
difficult and mistrust impossible. Some of the 
gravest obstacles to the Kingdom’s progress, in our 
own land and in the mission field, are to be found 
in the fact that A cannot work with B, or B cannot 
102 


CHRISTIANITY AND WORK 

work with C. Is there not something seriously 
wrong when that happens ? Ought not a Christian 
as such to be particularly good at any kind of work 
partnership ? Many of us can achieve that spirit, 
and the expression of it, in games, or in war; why 
not in the greatest enterprise of all ? The other 
quality I would name, as something without which 
a man’s work—be he bishop or bell-ringer, clerk or 
curate, secretary or social worker—will be, for the 
most part, “ mere sound and fury, signifying 
nothing,” is—humility. “ Oh yes, so-and-so: a 
good fellow, and a fine worker, but beginning to get 
his head a bit swelled. And the Bishop of blank : 
a great leader, with statesmanlike abilities, but what 
a pity that he is getting that sort of Bishop-self¬ 
consciousness which in the end spoils so many of 
them ! ” How often is that sort of thing said, or 
thought, by those who watch. After all, the only 
point of all “ religious work ” is to help people to 
see God. But they cannot see Him if their atten¬ 
tion is always being diverted on to you. . . . The 
only way is Christ’s way; and it takes a lifetime to 
learn it. “ Last of all and servant of all ”... 
“ not to be ministered unto but to minister ”... 
“ not I, but Christ.” 


O Saviour Christ, who didst appear to Thy 
disciples while occupied in homely duties, I pray 
Thee manifest Thy presence to me in my daily 
work. May I find Thee in every hour, at every 
turn. Help me to give myself to no occupation 
in which I may not seek Thee. May I abide in 
103 



EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


Thee, and reap the promise which is given to all who 
abide in Thy love—the promise that Thou wilt 
make my heart Thine intimate abode. Amen. 

Teach us, good Lord, to serve Thee as Thou 
deservest, to give and not to count the cost, to fight 
and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to 
seek for rest, to labour and not to ask for any 
reward, save that of knowing that we do Thy Will. 
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

Ignatius Loyola. 


104 


CHAPTER VI 

CHRISTIANITY AND RECREATION 


" He maketh me to he down in green pastures : He leadeth me 
beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.”— Psalm xxiii. 2, 3. 

“ Thus saith the Lord, I . . . will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem 
. . . and the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing 
in the streets thereof.”— Zechariah viii. 3, 5. 

" A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”— Proverbs xvii. 22. 

** No pedantry can make you men ! 

Yours are the morning and the day. 

You should be taught of wind and light. 

Your learning should be born of play.” 

George Winthrop Young. 

” God who created me 

Nimble and light of limb. 

In three elements free 
To run, to ride, to swim : 

Not when the sense is dim. 

But now from the heart of joy, 

I would remember Him : 

Take the thanks of a boy.” 

H. C. Beeching. 

" There is nothing so good for the inside of a man as the outside 
of a horse.”— Lord Avebury. 


CHAPTER VI 


CHRISTIANITY AND RECREATION 

I 

Nobody wants to live only half a life. The whole 
life and rich life which all desire must possess a 
certain rhythm and balance, work alternating with 
rest and recreation. “ All work and no play ” makes 
for sheer boredom; and when a man is constantly 
bored, then much of his capacity for living is seriously 
blunted. 

We have looked at some of the principles that 
should govern a Christian in his work. Are there 
also principles which he may apply to his recrea¬ 
tion ? Certainly there are. As we have already 
seen, God is concerned with everything in our daily 
living; there is no area in human life that is alien to 
Jesus Christ. And if we ask what His mind is about 
recreation, surely the answer would be, having 
regard to all He said about “ life,” that recreation 
should be truly recreative . That is to say, it should 
put a keener edge on life itself; it should be effec¬ 
tive in recouping and revitalizing the healthy 
energies of body and mind; it should make for an 
all-round fitness, physical, mental and spiritual. 
Others besides Christians would doubtless find them¬ 
selves in agreement with such a view of recreation. 
But that agreement might not extend to a point 
107 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


which for the Christian is crucial, namely, the ques¬ 
tion of motive . Anyone who throws in his lot with 
Christ has perforce to part company, completely in 
theory, progressively in practice, with selfishness. 
He learns to desire “ life,” and all the thousand 
experiences, recreation included, that make up life, 
not simply because it is a very pleasant thing to be 
alive, but mainly because “ live ” people (who are 
not necessarily agile intellectually or physically) are 
the most effective agents in spreading the Kingdom 
of God. And this great purpose of sharing life 1 
will rightly colour all his thinking and all his practice 
in the matter of recreation. It will not make him 
priggish or puritanical; but it will prompt him to 
be careful about bringing all his recreation and 
amusements within the circle of his life with God. 

II 

Not long ago I had occasion, on my way to preach 
in a distant church, to pass through a number of 
country villages on a Sunday afternoon. In every 
village I observed several groups of younger men and 
older boys lounging about doing absolutely nothing; 
and I have no doubt a similar sight could have been 
seen that afternoon in nearly every town and village 
in England. Now occasional idleness is right 
enough ; everyone likes sometimes to lie on his back 
and think of nothing, or smoke a pipe with his friends 
and talk of nothing in particular. But habitual 
lounging is another thing. And the cause of it 
surely lies in the fact that those who lounge simply 
1 Cf. above, Chapter IV. 

108 


CHRISTIANITY AND RECREATION 


do not know how to employ their hours of recrea¬ 
tion. Better far that the young men of a village 
should join in organized games of a Sunday after¬ 
noon than loaf at street corners. 

It is probable that those who read these lines are 
conscious of the fact that to waste recreation is to 
waste priceless opportunities of exploring life’s un¬ 
known territories. They will probably realize also 
that the essence of recreation is change of activity. 
Rest is active as well as passive. A miner or a porter 
might rest himself by sitting down to read; a clerk 
from an office would find more rest in a strenuous 
game of football or a hard row on the river. “ The 
philosopher will dig in his garden on a Sunday, while 
his gardener philosophizes.” 

In considering the many different forms of amuse¬ 
ment and recreation which are open to him, the 
Christian will naturally rule out any that are ques¬ 
tionable on moral grounds—such, for instance, 
as might involve cruelty to man or beast, or would be 
likely to work moral harm to those who take part 
in them. But after making this limitation there is 
still left a vastly wide field of choice. A form of 
recreation which is both cheap and simple, and which 
may be said to be indispensable to all normal 
people, is the habit of reading. To open a book— 
provided you know what book to open and how to 
absorb its contents—is to pass through a gate into a 
new and wonderful world. How odd that, out of 
the vast numbers who have learnt to read (in the 
literal and technical sense) there should be so few 
who keep in their pockets the key of that gate. 
Among the obstacles that keep men out of the 
109 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


Kingdom of truth and beauty stands, like a 
great hedge of barbed wire, our lack of education. 
“ How can you expect,” complains one who has 
a right to be heard on this subject, “ people 
to amuse themselves spiritually and intelligently 
if they have not been taught to understand 
true and beautiful things—if such things have, 
rather, been steadily rubbed out of them from their 
earliest childhood ? ” 1 And this lack of education 
is by no means confined to those who left school at 
fourteen to be absorbed into the industrial machine. 
There are plenty who ought to know better whose 
normal mental food, on work-days and holidays, 
is represented by a popular daily, with news and 
arguments served up in best “journalese,” one or 
two monthly magazines of the kind that has the 
inevitable feminine face on the cover, and a few 
third-rate novels. Many years ago I had an experi¬ 
ence of sanatorium life, cut off from any outdoor 
games or hobbies involving physical exertion. Never 
shall I forget the piteous boredom of some of my 
fellow-invalids (one or two of them English public 
school men) when they found themselves reduced to 
reading as their only main occupation! Their 
despair was comic (or tragic) to witness. They 
perfectly illustrated the saying that “ to the alert 
mind everything is an adventure, to the dullard 
everything is a bore.” 

Yet, even in after life, with a little guidance from 
wise advisers, a willingness to make some mental 
effort, and a very small expenditure of money, the 

1 The Rev. Percy Dearmer, D.D., Southend Church Congress 
Report , p. 278. 


no 


CHRISTIANITY AND RECREATION 


gate into the world of books may be opened, and 
the pilgrim set forth on an altogether fascinating 
journey through a wide and unexplored country. 
With the poets he will lift up his eyes to the beauty, 
the romance, the eternities of life; with the scien¬ 
tists he will probe its physical marvels; with the 
historians he will watch the long pageant of its 
human story; with the philosophers he will seek to 
understand the deep mystery of its beginning and 
its end; while in fiction and biography he will 
make friends with a goodly company of men and 
women whom he will be the better for knowing. 
And as he wanders through this wonderful land he 
will gain a sense of values and proportion and 
perspective which will have a transfiguring effect on 
the cramped spaces of his own little life . 1 

What is true of literature is true also of most 
sensible hobbies; they are open doors into new 
worlds. Drawing, sketching, photography, carpen¬ 
tering, gardening; the study of botany, geology, 
architecture—these, and other similar pursuits, do 
give the mind just that change of activity that it 
needs, and at the same time open up new worlds of 
wonder and interest; they make the man a more 
complete man, and therefore, it may be justly 
claimed, a better Christian. For the most part they 

1 Compare what Robert Lynd has said about the function 
of poetry, in his introduction to An Anthology of Modern Verse , 
p. xviii: “ It enables him to escape out of the make-believe exist¬ 
ence of everyday in which perhaps an employer seems more huge 
and immanent than God, and to explore reality, where God and 
love and beauty and life and death are seen in truer proportions, 
and where the desire of the heart is at least brought within sight of 
a goal.” 


in 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


need little apparatus; the only conditions they 
demand are a certain amount of intelligent interest 
and of willingness to learn. One may be permitted 
to wonder how many of those who read these lines 
have ever taken the trouble to explore and under¬ 
stand the places of architectural or historical interest 
that are to be found in their own town or village or 
immediate locality. How blind and slow we are 
where things of beauty and interest are too familiar 
or too accessible ! 

Brief reference must here be made—and the 
present writer has good cause to make it—to the 
very high recreational value of outdoor games. 
They may be overdone in some public schools, just 
as in less favoured schools, and in big industrial 
towns, there are too few facilities for those who 
would wish to play . 1 But there can be no question 
that, for the ordinary man and woman, a moderate 
playing of games is a factor in life of considerable 
importance. It supplies a discipline of the body 
which is invaluable; it directly promotes physical 
and mental health; and, in the case of team games, 
it has a real contribution to make to that “ fellow- 

1 To discuss “ Sunday observance ” is beyond the scope of this 
chapter. But the writer would venture to record his opinion 
that many of the recreations here referred to can be and should 
be enjoyed on a Sunday. For a large number of busy people 
there is little opportunity to enjoy them save on a Sunday. A 
Christian will naturally use his Sunday for the chief purpose of 
getting to know God better; a purpose which is in harmony with 
the secondary aims of recreating body and soul. All three aims 
must be pursued unselfishly, and with due regard to other people’s 
Sunday; and if any of them involve more work for a servant or 
servants, they should be modified or abandoned. Have friends to 
tea, by all means; but do the washing up yourself. 

112 


CHRISTIANITY AND RECREATION 


ship ” which Christians desire to establish in the 
world. In drawing attention to these ultimate 
benefits from outdoor games I do not mean for a 
moment to suggest—surely a priggish suggestion— 
that such ideas can be or should be consciously in 
the mind during play. The chief joy of a game is 
the self-abandonment with which you play it—all 
else is forgotten in the attempt to arrive at the 
tape first, to cross the line for a try, to get the 
hockey ball into the net, or the golf ball into 
the hole, or whatever the immediate objective of 
the game may be. Indeed, where there is even a 
moderate degree of excelling, mastery in a game, 
won by toil and pains, does bring you, for the 
moment, to the top of one of the peaks of human 
living. The feel of a racing eight as she lifts under 
you, like a live thing, with the eight blades grip¬ 
ping the water in perfect time; the half-volley 
at cricket lifted fair and square beyond the boun¬ 
dary ; the clean “ smash ” at lawn tennis or the 
exactly timed top-spin drive down the side line 
just beyond your opponent’s reach; the swerving, 
slippery run at rugger till you are past the back and 
between the posts; the long, low drive at golf, dead 
straight, to the very edge of the green; the jump 
which just clears the bar, the spurt which just 
breasts the tape—here are bits of experience in 
which one may taste something of the buoyancy, the 
gaiety, the keen-edged zest of human living. And I 
dare to say that the man who, not spoiling his games 
by selfish interest or selfish ambition, learns to fit 
these buoyant experiences into life’s larger whole, 
will find in them none other than Jesus Christ 

i 113 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


Himself. . . . He, the giver of “ life abundant ” is 
to be found, by those who look for Him, as surely in 
the playing fields as in those places where men are 
deliberately gathered together in His Name. 


Ill 

We may next consider that which, in larger or 
smaller measure, forms a part of most people’s 
recreation, namely amusements . It is an obvious 
fact that amusements bulk very large in modern life. 
They “ amuse ” an enormous number of people, 
and the provision of them employs an appreciable 
section of the population. Indeed the mass forms 
of recreation and amusement, such as the cinema 
and the spectacular professional football matches, 
constitute a serious problem which can hardly be 
dealt with here. These amusements, like other 
leisure-hour occupations such as gambling, need to 
be considered in relation to that which largely 
determines their character, namely, the deadly 
monotony of work which is the lot of the majority 
of town-dwellers to-day. This chapter does not 
attempt to do more than to discuss Christianity and 
recreation with those whose education has con¬ 
tinued after the age of fourteen and who do not 
spend every working day within the iron grip of our 
present industrial system. 

The first point for the Christian to be clear about 
is that the desire for amusement, the wish to find 
something to minister to our faculty for laughter, 
is a natural and healthy instinct. I should suspect 
n 4 


CHRISTIANITY AND RECREATION 


something gravely wrong with the mental make-up 
of anyone who could see nothing funny in the antics 
of a clown, or on whose face a good jest evoked no 
smile. “ Healthy laughter is the salt of life.” It 
lends savour to much that without it would be flat 
and stale. Where there is no laughter there is a 
diminution of life; and He, Christ, had nothing 
to do with diminishing life; it was more, not 
less, life that He came to bring. Who can doubt 
that He and His circle of friends must have enjoyed 
many a laugh together ? May we, at this point, 
apply the argument which runs like a thread all 
through this book ? Christianity has to do with the 
whole area of human living without any exception; 
that which is wrong it will destroy or redeem, and 
all the vast remainder it will irradiate, transmute, 
intensify. And yet men go on trying to rail off 
bits of life as irreclaimable, or at least as neutral. 
In particular have they done this with amusements. 
There may still be found religious people who are 
suspicious of amusements, or who, even if they 
recognize them as legitimate, regard them as 
having nothing to do with religion. 

I would venture to assert that the attempt, some¬ 
times taken in hand, to push this instinct for amuse¬ 
ment outside the Kingdom of God is one of the 
greatest mistakes that religion has ever made. 
Canon Guy Rogers, in an admirable paper on The 
Church and Amusements , x notes the fact that in the 
early days of the Y.M.C.A. Punch was excluded 
from its reading-rooms because, apparently, it was 
not sufficiently serious. “ It is no part of the 
1 Printed in The Challenge of June 4 and 11, 1920. 

IX 5 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


Y.M.C.A. to provide amusements or recreations for 
its members,” was a common statement of policy; 
and when zealous secretaries went so far as to say, 
“ no Christian young man should take part in a 
swimming match, or indeed a match of any kind,” 
there was no one to enjoy the joke ! Dr. Dale and 
Archbishop Trench received a severe rebuke from 
the official organ of the Society because they ven¬ 
tured to take part in the Tercentenary Shakespeare 
Celebrations at Stratford church. They were 
accused, in the sonorous language of the day, of 
“ trailing their Christian priesthood in the dust 
by offering homage at the shrine of a dead 
playwright! ” 

Now it ought to be recognized that this attitude 
of complete disapproval of all amusements, however 
strange it may seem to us, was in fact the expression 
of a natural and vigorous reaction against the coarse¬ 
ness and sensuality of many of the amusements of 
that day. It was, as Puritanism has always been, a 
protest against the encroachments of godlessness on 
some of life’s fair spaces. But it does unquestion¬ 
ably represent a maimed religion. There may 
indeed come times, as in a debased society, when 
the individual who would do right has no option 
but to break completely with human activities which, 
not necessarily wrong in themselves, have become, 
for him and his day, hopelessly entangled with 
evil. Then there is nothing for it, as Christ said 
plainly, but to cut off the offending hand or pluck 
out the eye. But that, as He showed also, is a 
desperate remedy, and it means a maimed life. It 
is safe to say that in our own day, while there is 
ii 6 


CHRISTIANITY AND RECREATION 

much that is morally perilous and even indisputably 
evil in contemporary amusements, the general con¬ 
ditions are not such as to justify the Christian in 
regarding and treating amusements generally as 
outside the Kingdom of God. It is, moreover, a 
shallow and arbitrary judgment—one still too preva¬ 
lent in some religious circles—which would identify 
“ the world ” with this or that particular amuse¬ 
ment. “ Love not the world nor the things that 
are in the world; ” as Christians we want to obey 
that precept, but there is no short cut to obedience 
to be had by deciding that “ the world ” means the 
theatre, or going to dances, or attending race- 
meetings. Unfortunately “ the world ” cannot be 
thus labelled and disposed of; as many of us have 
learnt by now, “ the world ” is really an inner 
temper or attitude which gets up with us in the 
morning and lies down with us at night, and can 
express itself in all sorts of ways that have nothing 
whatever to do with amusements. Nor have we any 
right frankly to abandon fair tracts of God’s world to 
the enemy. There are too many people who still 
cling to the timid and ancient superstition that the 
devil has all the best tunes! That contracting of life 
in the supposed interests of righteousness, that 
building of fences in the vain hope of shutting out 
sin and shutting in holiness, is an operation which 
will receive little encouragement from an honest 
study of the earthly life of Jesus Himself, with all 
its sanity, its freedom, its happy comradeship, its 
hatred of cant and its limitless belief in the possi¬ 
bilities of human goodness. We should surely be 
closer to His mind if we set ourselves to reclaim for 
ll 7 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 

the Kingdom of God everything human which is 
redeemable. 

Let us, in order to test the ideal thus set forth, 
consider in the light of it two of the commonest 
amusements of our day—as, indeed, of all time— 
namely, the theatre and dancing. It is clear that 
the drama is as fundamental and normal a part of 
human creative capacity as the power to paint or 
write or make music. And, as one of our leading 
actresses has pointed out, the Church should be 
“ more preoccupied with the theatre than with any 
of the other arts, for the reason that the drama has 
so direct a bearing on the mentality of the people 
and the conduct of life.” 1 In fact all will agree 
that the theatre might be one of the highest and 
purest forms of our amusements. How, in practice, 
may such an end be attained ? Not, assuredly, by 
good people condemning the stage on account of 
what they call the “ life behind.” That is no solu¬ 
tion. I should like to endorse what my friend 
Canon Rogers has said, and what is often forgotten, 
that “ it is no more possible to distinguish between 
the purity or muddiness of the people who sing or 
play or dance to you than it is to distinguish 
between the different sources from which your money 
comes or the morality of the writers whose books 
you read. When people talk about and isolate the 
evil environment of the stage, they forget that there 
is an evil environment also in politics; that our 
organized business life constitutes a far more difficult 
medium than the stage for living a Christian life, 

1 Miss Sybil Thorndike, on “The Aims and Ideals of the 
Stage,” Southend Church Congress Report , p. 271. 

118 


CHRISTIANITY AND RECREATION 


and that behind the whole of our social life lies an 
unchristianized social order.” The discrimination 
required of those who want to see the stage function¬ 
ing within the Kingdom of God is to support the 
kind of theatres and plays that make for that end 
and to discountenance those that do not. If a 
Christian should find himself looking on at a play 
or a scene that is disgusting, he should have the 
strength of mind to walk out, and to write and tell 
the management why he did so. The matter is, 
in the last resort, in the hands of the public. If 
more people cared, and showed that they cared, 
for good plays and for clean and clever entertain¬ 
ments, such as may be seen at several London 
theatres, then we should be less plagued and vic¬ 
timized by the feeble and suggestive stuff which the 
ignorance of too many producers supposes the public 
to want. 

As to dancing. Here, again, no sane Christian of 
to-day would condemn all dancing as wrong or 
approve any dancing as rightful recreation. All 
depends on the kind of dancing, the kind of com¬ 
pany, and the kind of environment. There is 
hardly any amusement, it has been pointed out, 
that suffers so much from the tyranny of absurd 
fashions. The necessary discrimination will not be 
impossible of attainment for anyone who is honestly 
trying to judge and to act in such things as a 
Christian gentleman or gentlewoman. Dancing 
which means mere “ promiscuous intimacy of con¬ 
tact ” and pulls down the sex relationship on to 
the lower levels is obviously bad. On the other 
hand, whether in more modern forms or in the 
“9 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


revived folk-dances, dancing may be, and often is, 
a thing of rhythm and beauty, and can express what 
is noble as well as what is ignoble in the relations 
of the sexes. But those who care for the values of 
the Kingdom will watch the matter of quantity as 
well as that of quality. I can hardly think that a 
Christian man or a Christian girl, however pure and 
healthy their love of dancing, would be able to 
spare the thought and time and energy for several 
dances a week. Recreation must, after all, always 
be servant and not master. 


IV 

There is only one more word that may be added, 
and it should be said very plainly. For the Christian 
disciple, his whole view of life and his whole way of 
living must, at every point, take into account the 
Cross of Jesus Christ. That richness of life, 
physical, mental, spiritual, for which all men 
hunger, which he, the Christian, longs fully to 
experience and to share, is inseparably connected 
with the death of Jesus. He, its giver, Himself 
entered life by the gate of death, Himself was made 
perfect by the things that He suffered; it is the 
wounds in His hands and feet that give His love, 
the very love of God Himself, its unique power to 
heal and redeem. We therefore, servants of the 
Crucified, will be content to sit loose to this world’s 
pleasures. We will not forget that we are disciples 
of Him who, on earth, knew no luxuries and had 
not even where to lay His head. In all our fun and 
120 


CHRISTIANITY AND RECREATION 


recreation, gratefully accepted and enjoyed as His 
own gift, we shall never be wholly unmindful of the 
submerged multitudes, friends of His, shut out 
from the shining land. We shall learn, like St. Paul, 
to travel light; with a happy self-sufficiency 1 to 
be equally content with much or with little of those 
things that make life pleasant. And, like the Master 
Himself, we shall, with high-hearted resolve, learn 
to put the Cause before everything else, and to find 
our greatest joy in willing sacrifice. 

1 Cf. Phil. iv. II, avTdpKr)s —“ I have learned how to be content 
wherever I am. ... I have been initiated into the secret for all 
sorts and conditions of life, for plenty and for hunger, for prosperity 
and for privations.” 

And cf. too, 2 Cor. vi. io : “ as having nothing and yet possessing 
all things.” 


121 


















CHAPTER VII 

CHRISTIANITY AND MONEY 


“Jesus spake a parable unto them saying, The ground of a 
certain rich man brought forth plentifully : and he reasoned within 
himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have not where to 
bestow my fruits ? And he said. This will I do : I will pull down 
my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my corn 
and my goods. And I will say to my soul. Soul, thou hast much 
goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be 
merry. But God said unto him, Thou fool. . . — St. Luke xii. 

16-20. 

" It is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful.”— 
1 Corinthians iv. 2. 


“ There is that maketh himself rich, yet hath nothing : There 
is that maketh himself poor, yet hath great wealth.”— Proverbs 
xiii. 7. 


“ The poor man wanteth many things, but the covetous man 
wants all. Oh, that there should be such boundless desires in our 
little bodies.”— Seneca. 

" It is probably much happier to live in a small house, and have 
Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than to live in Warwick Castle, 
and have nothing to be astonished at.”— Ruskin. 

“ What I saved, I lost; 

What I spent, I had; 

What I gave, I have.” 

Epitaph. 


CHAPTER VII 


CHRISTIANITY AND MONEY 

What is money? The question appears to be 
a simple one; but the Encyclopaedia Britannica has 
to admit that there is no simple answer to it. You 
can only define money in terms of function. Money 
in itself, untouched and unused, is nothing; hence 
the grotesqueness of the miser’s hoard of glittering 
coins. The point of money is in the range of things 
it can do. In a rough-and-ready fashion it may be 
described as a form of power. It enables you to 
exchange goods; if you have clothes to sell and want 
bread, and your neighbour has bread and wants 
clothes, money provides a standard of value, and a 
currency, whereby the exchange can be easily 
effected. Its range of function is indeed enormous. 
Without it, in a civilized community, there is no 
life to be had worth calling life. With it, you can 
make the world minister to your necessities and your 
convenience, your tastes and your pleasures, your 
aims and your ideals. Through it, by spending and 
by giving, you can express your personality, you can 
make some effective impact on your generation. 
Indeed, with sufficient money you may purchase 
power which emperors of old might have envied; 

125 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


you may buy newspapers and influence millions, and 
go far to shape a bit of the world to your liking. 


I 

I read a curious and interesting book the other day. 
The book is called Success , and it is written by a man, 
Lord Beaverbrook, who may certainly claim to have 
“ succeeded,” in the ordinary sense of the term. 
There are two words in the book which occur in 
every chapter, if not on every page; the words 
“ money ” and “ power.” In fact, the author’s 
idea of success is expressed almost exclusively in 
terms of money and power. Nothing else, for him, 
seems to matter very much. Fame, for instance, 
in his view, “ is only another name for either money 
or power.” If you want to find Reality, he says 
in effect, handling money is the way to do it. It is 
only “ money striven for that brings with it the real 
qualities in life.” “ The money brain is, in the 
modern world, the supreme brain.” 

Now it has to be admitted that the Beaverbrook 
gospel is swallowed and practised by a very large 
number of people. The acquisitive and possessive 
instinct is present in all of us, and dominant in many 
of us; and it is money or power that most people 
try to acquire. It is easy for the moralist to condemn 
offhand this devotion to a life of getting and having. 
It should, however, be remembered that the desire 
to succeed is not in itself a bad thing, and that some 
successful men, especially those high up in the indus¬ 
trial world, are spurred on less by a wish to amass a 
126 


CHRISTIANITY AND MONEY 


fortune than by the sheer delight of solving problems 
and mastering difficulties. There is much in what 
R. L. Stevenson has said, that the true blessedness of 
mankind is not to arrive but to travel. But when all 
allowance has been made for this motive, it still 
remains true that, unless he is exceptionally situated 
or very resolute in pursuing his ideals, the ordinary 
man who wants to “ succeed ” finds himself com¬ 
peting in the fields of money-getting. And, again 
and again, to enter those lists involves, almost 
inevitably, becoming selfish and hard and covetous. 
7o have becomes, insensibly, the main end of human 
living; the interests of property come to take pre¬ 
cedence of all other claims and values. Lord 
Macaulay once said that “ if the multiplication-table 
had interfered with any vested interests, some people 
would not have believed it yet.” 1 

With this view of money, and the way of living it 
involves, the Christian has quite definitely to part 
company. It is a question of values, with irre¬ 
concilable alternatives; the “ money-loving herd ” 
chooses one of them; he, as a Christian, chooses 
the other. He cannot, of course, do without money 
(we shall see, in a moment, what principles should 
govern his use of it); he may, indeed, be in a position 
in the financial or commercial world, where he has 
to handle, conceivably to acquire, large sums of it; 
but, as a follower of Jesus, he will never attempt to 
get it simply for his own selfish use or to gratify his 
own desires. He has to recognize the total incom¬ 
patibility of serving God and “ mammon.” There 
is no subject on which Christ’s teaching is more 

1 Quoted by Fosdick, 7 he Meaning of Service , p. 186. 

127 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


explicit and more emphatic than on the moral 
evil of loving money. He was constantly trying to 
make men see that man’s true life consisteth not in 
the abundance of things that he possesses; that 
life’s real treasures are such as no moth or rust can 
corrupt, or thieves take away; and that engrossing 
love of money may damage a man’s character 
beyond repair. 1 Naturally, there can be no com¬ 
promise between this view of money and that ex¬ 
pressed, for instance, in Lord Beaverbrook’s book 
already referred to. Yet of all the compromises 
that religious people, with human weakness, fumble 
after, none is commoner than the attempt to mix 
religion and money-making. It is a pathetic sight 
to see such an one bewildered and exhausted by 
“ the hopeless toil of living two lives . . . with one 
eye on this world and one on the next, part of his 
life given to God and part withheld, backing two 
horses at once and never knowing quite which he 
wants to win.” 2 


II 

None of us is wholly guiltless where religious 
compromising is concerned. But suppose that we 
do at least want to follow Christ in the matter of 
our money and material possessions, how are we to 
set about it and what will it actually involve ? What 

1 St. Luke xii. 15, St. Matthew vi. 19, xiii. 22; cf. 1 Timothy 
vi. 9-11. Cf. also St. Luke xvi. 19 f. (great possessions causing 
selfish indolence); St. Luke xii. 13 f. (fellowship, spoilt by covetous¬ 
ness) ; St. Luke xii. 16 f. (business men heaping up wealth). 

2 T. W. Pym, Psychology and the Christian Life , p. 101. 

128 


CHRISTIANITY AND MONEY 

are the principles on which the Christian is to 
regulate his use of money ? The first and obvious 
use of money, for everyone, is governed by the 
necessity of maintaining life at a reasonable level of 
satisfaction and efficiency. Christ showed that in 
God’s sight every human life has an absolute value, 
both for what it is and what it may become. This 
means, in our world, that every man ought (normally) 
to have the opportunity of earning enough money 
to keep himself and his family in health, and, beyond 
bare necessities, to have a sufficient share in such 
boons as education and leisure as to secure for living 
a certain measure of fullness. Let me hasten to 
add (what has been pointed out in another con¬ 
nection) that, for the Christian, fullness of life can 
never be a merely selfish aim; it is the means 
whereby he may play his part in the whole scheme of 
things and fit in with, and further, the Plan of 
God. 

With this general statement as to the ordinary, 
and proper, use of money, most people would 
probably agree. One or two reflections, however, 
at once suggest themselves. In the first place, we 
are faced with the staggering fact that even a modest 
minimum of satisfying life is quite beyond the reach 
of a vast number of the present population of the 
world. With such a state of affairs true philanthropy 
can never rest satisfied. The principle of the living 
wage is one way of giving concrete expression to 
this ideal of equality of opportunity. 1 Every adult 
ought to have some “ socially serviceable ” means 
of earning a wage sufficient to give him and his 
1 Cf. above, p. 72. 

129 


K 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


family some real share in Life. And this is a claim 
which the Church should back, in the name of 
Christianity, with all the weight of its authority. 
Too often has history found it siding with the 
“ haves ” as against the “ have nots.” 

But what is a fair share of “ Life ” ? What is a 
reasonable, average level of “ personal civilization ” 
(if the phrase may be used) with which a Christian 
ought to be content ? Obviously the capacity to 
live, in the word’s deeper senses, will vary with the 
infinite variety of different people. But is there 
some normal setting of life—the kind of setting which 
money can procure—which ought to satisfy ? How 
much ought I, as a Christian, to spend, for myself 
and my family, on food and house, on comfort and 
convenience, on education and recreation ? Such 
questions are easier to ask than to answer. Indeed 
it is doubtful if there is any one answer which 
is applicable to all. Each must find his own answer, 
in the light of Christ and his own conscience. What 
may rather be suggested is, not a universal standard 
but a universal test —the test of efficiency, physical 
and spiritual, in the service of the Kingdom. With 
due regard to my individual capacities, and to my 
particular circumstances, and with due regard also 
to the dispossessed multitudes, what is the minimum 
I need to make me fit to play my part in life as a 
Christian citizen ? That is the kind of question a 
Christian might well ask himself. 

One other consideration may be mentioned at this 
point. The Christian, as such, will weigh carefully 
not merely the way in which he uses his money, but 
the method by which he gets it. It has to be 
130 


CHRISTIANITY AND MONEY 


admitted that it is easier to state this princple than 
to indicate with precision how it may be acted upon. 1 
In the closely woven interdependence of modern 
industry, it is very difficult for an individual to strike 
out a line of his own in money affairs or business 
affairs. Where the system as a whole makes for 
selfishness, it is hard to live and work within it 
unselfishly; if most people in your line of trade are 
out simply for profits, it is far from easy to run your 
own business on a basis of service. But, as many 
Christian business men have splendidly shown, 
“ where there’s a will there’s a way,” and Christi¬ 
anity need not be left out of the making of money. 
And the man who is determined to follow Christ 
will simply refuse to sell his services to, or invest 
his money in, any business that is not in its main 
intention useful to the community, and that does 
not treat with equity and humane consideration 
those who work for it. Only by such action, con¬ 
certed and on a large scale, can we Christians prove 
the ultimate fallacy of the common assumption that 
covetousness and selfishness are the only effective 
economic motives. As G. A. Studdert-Kennedy 
has finely claimed, “We hold a different view of 
man ... we hold that men are now to some 
extent not economically determined but God-deter¬ 
mined beings, and that they can become more and 
more God-determined beings.” 2 


1 Cf. Fosdick, The Meaning of Service , p. 184: “ ‘ Thou shalt 
not covet * sounds well in the abstract, but it becomes perplexing 
when one adds, ‘ Thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s customers! ’ ” 

2 St. Martin's Review , No. 368, p. 450. 

131 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


III 

Let us pursue this question of money use to a 
further stage. The majority of people, after pro¬ 
viding for life’s necessities, are left with a certain 
margin, large or small as the case may be. On 
what principle is this margin of money-power to be 
used ? There is a clear Christian answer to this 
question. Reference has already been made to the 
Christian warning as to the moral peril always 
latent in money. If it is easy to become selfish and 
covetous in the process of getting money, that fatal 
habit of thought and life is perhaps still easier to 
develop in the matter of using your “ margin.” 
There is many a man, with money to spare, who is 
for ever extending the circle of his “ necessities,” 
until, by a gradual process of self-deception, the 
larger house, the second car, the extra servant, the 
fresh comfort or convenience—or, on another scale, 
the extra drink or the more frequent cinema visit— 
are all considered essential to natural and normal 
living. Not that he, or she, is deliberately covetous; 
he simply does not think—and most selfishness is 
born of not thinking. And behind the lack of 
thought the real motives operate : the instinctive 
desires to be extra safe, or extra comfortable, or to 
be like so-and-so, or to impress the neighbours. In 
such fashion “ money gets into the saddle and spares 
neither whip nor spur.” 

For the use of this money “ margin,” Christianity 
has another and a better way. Christianity never 
says it is wrong to possess any margin; but it 
132 


CHRISTIANITY AND MONEY 


suggests clear principles for its use. These principles 
may be summed up in two substantives. One of 
them is detachment. The Christian cannot remind 
himself too often that, for him, material things can 
never be sought for their own sakes: that his “ life 
consisteth not in the abundance of things that he 
possesseth.” Therefore, he will sit loose to material 
possessions as to material enjoyments. 1 He will 
refuse to give over-much of thought and energy 
to that which the moth and rust doth corrupt. He 
will not refuse responsibilities which he should clearly 
accept; but he will endeavour to avoid being 
encumbered with an undue amount of personal 
property and personal privilege. He will avoid an 
exaggerated scrupulousness, and will try to learn 
the secret of detachment, being neither put about 
if he has to go short nor softened when things are 
comfortable. 

“ And if to-night mine inn be good, 

I shall be glad; 

But if to-morrow’s fare be rude, 

And lodging bad, 

It shall be so much easier then 
To strike my tent, and on again.” 2 


The other guiding word is stewardship. The 
principle of stewardship in relation to all gifts, 
whether of character or property, is clearly laid 
down in the parables of the Talents and the Pounds. 3 
All that I have is in no sense my absolute property 
to do with just as I like; it is held in trust for God 

1 Cf. above, p. 120. 2 Walter C. Smith. 

3 St. Matthew xxv. 14-30; St. Luke xix. 11-27. 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


and His Kingdom, and I am responsible to Him for 
a faithful discharge of my stewardship. This is a 
far-reaching principle. You may be able to justify, 
at the bar of your conscience, this or that expenditure, 
as tending directly or indirectly to promote the ends 
of the Kingdom. What cannot be justified, if you 
recognize your stewardship, is irresponsible expendi¬ 
ture. Gambling is an obvious instance of irre¬ 
sponsible expenditure. Why, it is often asked, is 
it right for one to Spend ten shillings on a book, or 
a theatre, or a game of golf, or any other favourite 
hobby or recreation, and wrong for another, who 
enjoys racing, to spend his ten shillings by putting 
it on a horse ? I should answer unhesitatingly that, 
as God’s steward, I have no kind of right either to 
part with money I hold, or to receive another man’s 
money, in a purely irresponsible fashion. Stewards 
may not do that; “ it is required in stewards that a 
man be found faithful.” Moreover, if, among 
Church people generally, there was less of the idea 
that it is rather fine generosity to give or £100 
to this or that part of the work of God’s Kingdom, 
and rather more of the idea that the Kingdom’s 
members would, as the natural and normal thing, 
lay out their trust funds in the Kingdom’s interests, 
we should hear less of recurrent financial crises in 
Church societies. 


IV 

How, precisely, is this stewardship to be dis¬ 
charged ? What are the most effective ways in 
which this margin of money-power can be used for 
i34 


CHRISTIANITY AND MONEY 

good? One or two practical suggestions may be 
offered. First and obviously, a certain proportion 
of any margin should be devoted to helping those 
who are short of life’s necessities. From the earliest 
times this has always been recognized as a funda¬ 
mental Christian duty. Indeed, as I have already 
shown in the chapter on “ Sharing Life,” some 
Christians feel this duty to be so urgent that, besides 
giving of their “ margin,” they endeavour, for 
Christ’s sake, to practise a voluntary equality in the 
standard of living . 1 In any case, while so many of 
his brother men are in such desperate need, every 
true Christian will feel it impossible to spend large 
sums on his private needs or pleasures, and he will 
eagerly seek for ways in which he can use his money- 
power to help stem physical distress at home and 
abroad . 2 He will always realize that the Kingdom 
of God is concerned not merely with “ saving souls,” 
but with the provision of all that makes for abundant 
life. 

Then, further, it is clearly right and Christian 
that a certain amount of everyone’s money should 
be devoted to the common benefit of the community 
in the form of taxes. The Christian Churches might 
well give more teaching and inspiration in this matter. 
Why does one hardly ever hear a sermon on the 
meaning and the duty of tax-paying from a Christian 
point of view ? It needs to be asserted emphatically 
that a Christian, as a Christian, ought to be scrupu¬ 
lously honest and invincibly cheerful in paying his 
rates and taxes. We should not miss the significance 

1 Cf. p. 72. 

2 By, for example, generous giving to Hospitals, Relief Funds, etc. 

135 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


of our Master’s plain words about this. “ Render 
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto 
God the things that are God’s.” 1 That “ and ” is 
a Hebrew expression which roughly corresponds to 
our phrase “ and so.” “ Give the State what is 
due to the State, and so, in doing this, you will be 
giving God what is His—you will be performing a 
duty which He lays upon you.” 

Whatever remains of money-power’s margin 
should clearly be applied, directly or indirectly, 
to furthering the aims of the Kingdom of God. 
It is, of course, true that, in the last resort, the 
most effective way of spreading the Kingdom is 
by the quiet, penetrating, unobtrusive leaven of 
personal influence and personal service, which costs 
nothing: nothing, that is, that can be expressed in 
terms of money. But it is also true that any form 
of corporate and organized Christian activity, such 
as maintaining Churches, paying ministers, running 
clubs, printing Bibles, spreading literature, sending 
out missionaries and so forth, cannot possibly be 
carried on without money. To transfer Christians 
from a more favoured to a less favoured country— 
from say, England to Central Africa or Turkestan— 
in order thus to share our life with those who are 
even more needy than we, cannot be done without 
a large expenditure. And wherever you attempt to 
Christianize environment, here or elsewhere—which 
you must do if you want to share all that makes up 
life—then you are at once and inevitably committed 
to a number of tasks of a material kind, travelling, 
transporting, building, printing, feeding, doctoring 
1 St. Matthew, xxii. 21. 

136 


CHRISTIANITY AND MONEY 


and so on, all of which are completely dependent on 
forms of power which money alone can provide. 
Money is, in fact, “ the most portable shape into 
which human personality can precipitate itself; ” 
your money provides an almost magical way in which 
you can supply personal needs, and respond to 
personal calls thousands of miles away on the other 
side of the globe. 

Never was it harder than it is to-day (1922) to 
find the needed money for the many Christian and 
philanthropic enterprises. This difficulty is no 
doubt partly due to the post-war economic situation. 1 
But the larger part of the difficulty would be removed 
if more Christians could come to see that to spend 
money on the Kingdom is not a pious “ extra ” or 
a particularly laudable act to be seen and praised 
by men, but a plain, ordinary Christian duty and a 
matter of normal Christian stewardship. How 
could it be otherwise with the children of Him who 
so loved the world that He gave all, even His only 
Son ? 

1 Yet it can hardly be pretended that the money is “ not there,” 
having regard to the fact that last year (1921) the nation spent 
400 million pounds on intoxicating drinks, 200 millions on tobacco, 
and 200 millions on armaments. 


137 





•\ r •• .« ' - " 














CHAPTER VIII 

CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 


“ The Word was made flesh.”— St. John i. 14. 

" Whatever a man sows, that will he also reap. He who sows 
in the field of his lower nature, will from that nature reap a harvest 
of destruction and ruin; but he who sows to serve the Spirit will 
from the Spirit reap life eternal .”—Galatians vi. 7, 8 (Weymouth’s 
version). 

“ Life is only incidentally physical. It is really an astounding 
spiritual phenomenon.”— Vida Scudder. 


** No man has ever dared to call Jesus, in any opprobrious sense, 
sexless : yet in character He stands above, and, if one may use 
the term, midway between the sexes,—His comprehensive humanity 
a veritable storehouse of the ideals we associate with both the sexes. 
No woman has ever had any more difficulty than men have had in 
finding in Him the realized ideal.”—G. A. Johnston Ross. 

** He is the half part of a blessed man 
Left to be finished by such as she; 

And she a fair divided excellence. 

Whose fullness of perfection lies in him.” 

Shakespeare. 

*' Dear Lord and Father of mankind, 

Forgive our foolish ways 1 
Re-clothe us in our rightful mind. 

In purer fives Thy service find. 

In deeper reverence praise.” 

J. G. Whittier. 


CHAPTER VIII 


CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 

I 

No book which sets out to describe and explain 
“ every-day religion ” can be silent about a deep- 
down human instinct which, for every man and 
woman, is one of the great shaping forces of life. 
To shut our eyes to the power of the sex instinct is 
foolish and futile; wiser is it to seek to understand 
it and its true place and function in human living. 

This chapter is an attempt to state, simply and 
plainly, what the writer believes to be the Christian 
view in a matter which, in some directions, raises 
very complex questions. Let me begin by referring 
to two ideas which are common but not Christian. 
One is the notion, bequeathed to us from the 
Victorian age, that the whole sex instinct, with a 
great deal of its expression, is at bottom something 
not quite decent, something which should be hushed 
up and kept a mystery, something which “ nice ” 
people should not discuss even in intimate conversa¬ 
tion. There must be many men and women who 
find it hard to shake off the idea, implanted in child¬ 
hood and fostered during school years, that Nature’s 
processes of birth are mysteries which are not really 
quite respectable; and it is such people who are too 
prone to meet children’s questions on these things 
H 1 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


with evasions and falsehoods, thus often driving the 
boys and girls to get their information from undesir¬ 
able and grimy sources. And so in their turn, they, 
as they grow up, never wholly escape from the dread¬ 
ful fallacy that there is something in sex that is 
essentially base and depraved. That is a mischievous 
fallacy. It is the unclean minds of men that have 
read into the wonder and beauty of the sex relation¬ 
ship a shame and an indecency which in truth is 
not there. If God is in creation, if Nature is His gar¬ 
ment and her activities the outcome of His working, 
if in Christ He became man with a body like unto 
our bodies—then every capacity and function of the 
human organism has a high and holy use, a use 
within the moral order of His Kingdom. 

The other attitude towards matters of sex which 
is as common as it is un-Christian, is that which may 
be described as unabashed animalism. This view 
sees the sex relationship either simply as Nature’s 
way of propagating the species, or as something to be 
exploited for the sensual pleasure it may yield. In 
some form or other this base form of materialism 
begrimes with its foul fingers much of the life of our 
day. It provides copy for the newspapers, subjects 
for nasty plays, themes for third-rate novelists, 
material for morbid and ignorant amateur psycholo¬ 
gists ; it muddies the minds of boys and girls, degrades 
friendship, spoils marriages, breaks up homes, ruins 
health, and is the direct cause of the monster evils 
of prostitution and venereal disease. It is a canker 
that has before now destroyed empires, and is still 
capable, if unchecked, of gnawing away the vitals of 
our modern civilization. 


142 


CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 

It is the main assumption behind all this mass of 
evil which no Christian can entertain for a moment. 
Most of what is wrong in sex relationships to-day, as 
at all times, is due to the idea, and the fallacious 
idea, that man is after all an animal, and cannot be 
expected to free himself wholly from animal instincts 
and animal pleasures, and that therefore an evil such 
as prostitution is quite inevitable. I remember, in 
War days, many a talk about these things with soldier 
friends. I noticed that men of high ideals, themselves 
straight and clean, not infrequently voiced, or at least 
accepted the view that sexual vice must be; that it 
has an almost normal place in the community, and 
that for the ordinary virile man it is a natural and 
practically legitimate satisfaction of a universal 
physical need. They did not seem seriously to face 
the question that to satisfy such a need in such a 
way must involve the utter degradation of a large 
number of women, with the infinitely terrible out¬ 
rage on personality which that degradation entails. 
The fallacy, the complete wrong-headedness—as I 
see it—of that view of vice lies in the way in which 
it isolates man’s physical capacities and functions 
from other parts of his being. It says, in effect, 
that because man is descended from an animal it is 
only “ natural ” that he should in some ways behave 
like one. If this argument is sound, then we might 
well go into the street and imitate a puppy chasing 
its tail, or wolf our food in a solitary corner like a 
dog with a bone. Yet ordinary human decency 
knows perfectly well that the fact of a man’s animal 
ancestry is no kind of justification for his breaking the 
higher laws which govern him as a human being. 

H3 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


And Christianity has always proclaimed that the 
essential thing in every man, and every woman, is 
his kinship with God and not his affinity with the 
beasts of the field. 

Not in sex matters only, but at a hundred different 
points in life, we are always being confronted by 
these two tremendous alternatives. We are given 
the choice between humanity and animalism; we 
are free to follow the higher road or the lower, and 
those who choose with Christ’s men will find a hard 
battle and a stiff climb before them. The Christian 
way in sex relationships leads to uplands of unimagin¬ 
able beauty and wonder, but the path is steep and 
there are no short cuts. The demands are severe, 
like those of which Gareth and his companions were 
warned by the old Seer as they stood for the first 
time, astonished and expectant, outside the gateway 
of King Arthur’s wonder city : 

“ Yet take thou heed of him, for, so thou pass 
Beneath this archway, then wilt thou become 
A thrall to his enchantments, for the King 
Will bind thee by such vows, as is a shame 
A man should not be bound by, yet the which 
No man can keep ; but, so thou dread to swear, 

Pass not beneath this gateway, but abide 
Without, among the cattle of the field.” 1 


II 

Christianity asserts about sex two great con¬ 
structive principles, principles that are bound up 

1 For the simile I am indebted to one of G. A. Studdert- 
Kennedy’s addresses. 


144 


CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 


with its belief in the absolute value of human 
personality and its synthesis of spiritual and material. 
It says, on the one hand, that men and women are 
complementary, each sex filling up that which is 
lacking in the other, and each with its own contri¬ 
bution to make to the common good of human living. 
Sex is, in fact, “ part of the great rhythm of life, 
running through all the higher creation.” 1 
“ Human-kind has been created male and female, 
and those of different sex can and must help each 
other in a manner impossible for those of the same 
sex. That is the glory of the world and its shame.” 
And it is noteworthy that many of the finest men and 
women, who have contributed much to the life of 
their generations, have found in Christ their ideal of 
man and of woman. He appeals to what is feminine 
in woman as well as to what is virile in man. And 
it is, in the last resort, His teaching and His principles 
that have at length won an almost universal recogni¬ 
tion of women’s special worth and work in the world 
to-day. 

The other great Christian principle is that, in all 
personal relationships between men and women, 
sex is sacramental. By “ sacramental ” I mean this : 
that that physical something which marks off the 
relationships between man and woman from those 
between man and man or woman and woman is 
never, ideally, merely physical or sensuous, but always 
a symbol, a token, an expression of a deeper moral 
and spiritual relationship. This view of sex contact 
is inherent in Christian thinking which, with Christ, 

1 Miss Maude Roy den, Sex and Common Sense , p. 31. The book 
is full of clear and beautiful thinking. 

L 145 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


sees all the visible world as the expression of infinite 
mind, and man’s body as the expression of man’s 
soul. On this view love means a spiritual union, 
of which marriage is the supreme sacrament. Here, 
at its highest and noblest, is “ the instinct to create, 
going forth in the power of love, proving to us day 
by day that only love can create, bringing us nearer 
to the Divine power, who is Love, and who created 
the heaven and the earth.” 1 Any physical passion 
which is enjoyed as an end in itself, and is no sacra¬ 
ment of true love, is a revolting and degrading 
thing, akin to—indeed lower than—the intercourse 
of animals. 


Ill 

This kind of Christian sacramentalism is the only 
safe guide in sex relationships of every kind. It is 
the source and strength of that quiet chivalry in 
every-day intercourse which is still the birthright, 
and often the practice, of the ordinary Englishman. 
It seems to me mere churlishness to argue, as men 
sometimes argue, that the women of our day have 
claimed to enjoy men’s rights and to do men’s work, 
therefore let them take their chance in life’s rough 
and tumble, without special favour or consideration. 
Whatever deserved equality of work and status they 
may have attained, they still remain in a real sense 
the “ weaker sex,” and should be conceded that 
“ courtesy of strength to weakness ” which is the 
essence of true chivalry. It is good to see men show 
this chivalry in tube or ’bus; and I read recently 
1 M. Royden. 

146 


CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 


with peculiar pleasure the testimony of a German 
woman in the occupied area to this characteristic of 
Englishmen. “ I saw,” she says, “ an English officer 
of high rank rise from his seat in a tramway-car and 
help a burdened old woman up the steps into his 
vacant seat. I saw him dispose of her bundle—such 
attentions as no German officer would bestow upon 
any woman—and I went home to marvel. As time 
went on we women found it was the ordinary 
behaviour of your officers.” 1 

This Christian sacramentalism is, further, the 
guiding principle in all true friendships between men 
and women. It is probably true to say that such 
friendship, which is one of the most beautiful and 
wonderful things in human experience, is more 
possible to-day than it has ever been before. In the 
days of our fathers and grandfathers it was thought 
very important that the relations between men and 
women should always be what was called “ proper,” 
with the result that they often became self-conscious, 
stilted, affected, and even stupid. In our day there 
is a strong reaction against those Victorian ideas 
and manners. This reaction is very natural, and 
much of it is sane and sound. The relation between 
the sexes to-day is often that of a healthy, happy, 
clean comradeship, easy and unembarrassed, born 
of sport or some other rational joint interest, a thing 
of the open air, metaphorically as well as literally. 
And there are many men who have cause to bless a 
blameless friendship with a good woman. But if 
some profit by this new liberty, others, it must be 
confessed, have shown themselves less worthy of it. 

1 From England, by an Overseas Englishman. 

H7 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 

It is all too easy for the man of to-day to fall below 
the standard which is planted in the conscience and 
instinct of every true gentleman. There is much— 
too much—in modern life to make men think that 
women are in the world just to minister to their 
amusement and gratification, and to make women 
acquiesce in that idea. There are those who 
deliberately give effect to that bestial conception, 
with a hideous indifference, or a fatal blindness, to 
the degradation thereby involved for womanhood 
as well as manhood. There are others who, without 
descending to vice, have half-unconsciously allowed 
their thought of the man and woman relationship 
to be lowered and coarsened. Influenced by the 
presentment of life which they see at many theatres 
and cinemas, and in a certain type of novel, they 
learn to think of love as something easy, exciting, 
pleasurable, irresponsible, unfettered by ordinary 
restraints, something to be gazed at, feasted on, 
dissected, toyed with; and so they come to play 
with love in their own experience, and thus both 
work grievous hurt on other lives, and for themselves, 
fritter away in little bits, cheaply and unthinkingly, 
that which is the very highest thing in all the 
capacity and heritage of their manhood. This is 
the real harm in flirtation—flirtation that is some¬ 
thing more than merely “ innocent.” It takes 
without giving; or it gives that which it has no right 
to give. By separating physical from spiritual it 
exploits and degrades human personality. Far 
otherwise is it with the man who is mindful of the 
dictates of true chivalry. His whole thought of 
womanhood is on a different level, breathes another 
148 


CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 


atmosphere. For him, love is a high and holy thing, 
to be revered, not played with. For him, all that 
womanhood is and may be, the tender grace and 
charm, the beauty of form and face, the appeal of 
her dependence, the subtle surprises of her com¬ 
panionship, the ministries of her sympathy, the 
wonder of her friendship, the selfless glory of her 
love—all this he sees to be God’s sheer gift for the 
blessing of humanity. Something of this vision, 
this instinct, will be at the back of his mind in all 
his contact with the women he knows and sees. 
And, therefore, his one guiding principle as he 
meets and mixes with them will be— reverence . 
The foundation of all true friendship, between man 
and man, and woman and woman, and most of all 
between man and woman, is reverence for human 
personality. 1 

He who has learnt to see all sex relationships in 
this light and from this angle will have a sure 
principle to guide him in the great experience of 
courtship and marriage. He will know how to fill up 
“ love ” with its true content, and will have no truck 
with the lust which borrows love’s name and walks 
in its guise. It was Jesus and His new order of good¬ 
ness that first set love free from lust; and it is He, and 
His, who to-day are strong to resist any attempts to 
reduce love again to that ancient and terrible slavery. 
Because love is sacramental, and linked with the 
love of God, marriage is manifestly the highest and 
most sacred relationship into which two human 
beings can enter. It is of necessity permanent, not 

1 This passage is taken, with some alteration and addition, from 
the writer’s Knights in Armour. 

149 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


only because of the deep-down human desire for 
stability in personal relationships, but even more 
because the mutual giving of two personalities 
cannot in the nature of the case be temporary; when 
love gives it gives for ever and not for a time. More¬ 
over, this mutual giving issues, normally, in the 
inevitably permanent responsibilities of family life. 
The Marriage Service emphasizes and symbolizes 
the fact that this permanence cannot be ensured 
nor these responsibilities duly discharged unless the 
human love is shot through and through with the 
love of God. As Miss Royden beautifully says, 
“ We want our love to be divine before we can under¬ 
take the whole happiness of another human being.” 

But what of the failures ? What of the terribly 
numerous instances where there never was any real 
love between the two joined together, or where 
that love has been killed and the marriage bond has 
become a mockery ? What is the Christian to think, 
or do, when confronted by these disasters ? Let it 
be said clearly that, where there is failure of any 
kind, the Christian has no alternative but to go all 
conceivable lengths in the effort to forbear and 
forgive, to mend and heal and repair and restore. 
Such effort is due to the community; for marriage 
is a social thing, and the community is deeply con¬ 
cerned in its success or in its failure. And it is 
dictated by the Christian law of forgiveness, even 
as it is rendered more hopeful by the power of 
Christianity to transform and uplift. With patient 
and honest endeavour there may be, in this way, and 
there often is, at least a partial rebuilding of what 
threatened to be complete ruin. Where, however, 
150 


CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 


after such honest attempt, or owing to irreparable 
circumstance, there is still complete and utter 
failure, then there should surely be release. 1 What 
good can come of pretending that a marriage is real 
and sacred when it is not ? 2 


IV 

Two things may be said in conclusion. One is 
this : that neither marriage nor its debased counter¬ 
feits are the only outlet for the sexual instinct. It is 
precisely there that we human beings differ from the 
animals. Modern psychologists are probably right 
in tracing a close connection between our sex instincts 
and our creative, artistic, and even religious, 
capacities. There is something in man that craves 
to create, to express; and, even in our semi-pagan, 
semi-civilized Western world, there are hundreds 
of fields of useful and beneficent human activity in 
which this deep desire in men and women may find 
release and outlet. There are many unmarried 
teachers, parsons, nurses, secretaries and others 
doing splendid work in the world to-day, who find 
in that work a satisfying and compensating scope 

1 In a properly ordered society such a release would not be, as it 
often is now, “ good copy ” for unclean newspapers to purvey to 
the dirty-minded among their readers. 

2 Cf. Miss Royden, op. cit. f pp. 128 f.: “ What I do say is that 
in Church and State we should concentrate all our efforts on helping 
men and women to a wise, enlightened, noble conception of marriage 
before they enter on it, and not on a futile and immoral attempt 
to hold them together by a mere legal contract when all that made 
it valid has fled.” 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


for the vital powers in them which could, in other 
circumstances, have made them good husbands and 
wives and fathers and mothers. This is part of the 
answer to those who say that for civilized human 
beings continence is impossible and vice inevitable . 1 
Given tasks congenial, useful, engrossing, continence 
is within anyone’s grasp, “ without exhaustion and 
without asceticism.” The appeal of sexuality is 
infinitely reinforced when it clamours at tired and 
empty minds. 

The strong and decisive part of the idealist’s 
answer to the “ realist ” in sexual questions is the 
assertion, backed by centuries of Christian experience, 
that the goodness of Jesus, set forth as the standard 
for the plain man, would be outrageously impossible 
were it not infectious. We cannot copy it but we 
can catch it: catch it simply by spending time in 
His company. This is no mere optimistic theory : it 
is tested fact. Men and women in every generation 
have found in Him, as they still find in Him, the 
power-centre of purity. Sex is no problem, no 
obsession, no tyrant when He is seen and known; 

1 An equally common fallacy asserts that continence is harmful 
and results in loss of sexual power. Medical science makes short 
work of this view. Sir James Paget says: “ Chastity does no harm 
to mind or body; its discipline is excellent.” Dr. Barton says: 
“ Continence is possible, and not only compatible with, but conducive 
to health.” Dr. Clifford Allbutt says, “ Continence, so far from 
being harmful, is not harmful at any age ; and in adolescence and 
early adult life it is physically and mentally economical. Whether 
in married or in celibate life, science gives its imperious sanction 
to purity of heart and clean habits of thought.” (Quoted in A 
Woman’s Honour , by Spencer Elliott, S.P.C.K., “ Straight Talks 
Series.”) 


152 


CHRISTIANITY AND SEX 


He is, always, the liberator, the purifier, the trans¬ 
former ; there is an uncounted number of men and 
women alive to-day whose mind and body have 
been “ made clean by His body,” who have “ found 
themselves,” as men, as women, through touch with 
His human, living, Divine self. From the most 
sordid slums of human thinking and human living 
there is always one way out—the way of Jesus. 


i53 






















































B * - j 






CHAPTER IX 

CHRISTIANITY AND HEALTH 


“ Jesus went about . . . teaching . . . and preaching . . . and 
healing all manner of disease and all manner of sickness among 
the people. . . “ As many as touched Him were made perfectly 

whole.”— St. Matthew iv. 23; xiv. 36. 


“ Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost 
which is in you? ”—1 Corinthians vi. 19. 


“ To this day, we know, the entire creation sighs and throbs with 
pain; and not only so, but even we ourselves, who have the Spirit 
as a foretaste of the future, even we sigh to ourselves as we wait 
for the redemption of the body that means our full sonship.”— 
Rom. viii. 22, 23 (Moffatt). 


" The Soul and Body make a perfect Man, when the Soul com¬ 
mands wisely, or rules lovingly, and cares profitably, and provides 
plentifully, and conducts charitably that Body which is its partner 
and inferior. But if the Body shall give Laws, and by the violence 
of the appetite, first abuse the Understanding, and then possess 
the superior portion of the Will and Choice, the Body and the 
Soul are not apt company, and the man is a fool and miserable. 
If the Soul rules not, it cannot be a companion : either it must 
govern or be a slave.”— Jeremy Taylor. 

“ If you wish to be well, you must live on sixpence a day, and 
earn it yourself.”—A bernethy. 

“ Several of the greatest psychologists . . . tend towards the 
view that the source of power is to be regarded as some impulse 
that works through us, and is not of our own making. . . . We are 
not merely receptacles but channels of energy. Life and power is not 
so much contained in us, it courses through us. Man’s might is 
not to be measured by the stagnant water in the well, but by the 
limitless supply from the clouds of heaven.”— J. A. Hadfield. 


CHAPTER IX 


CHRISTIANITY AND HEALTH 

The population of the world, of our day is com¬ 
puted to be somewhere about sixteen hundred 
million. It is a safe guess that, of these, many 
millions suffer from some form of disease or physical 
infirmity. It is not a guess but a certainty to say 
that the greater part of all this disease is preventable 
and could be abolished. For a long time past medi¬ 
cal science has been moving steadily towards this 
conclusion. And during the last ten years or so 
this conviction has been strongly reinforced by fresh 
and far-reaching psychological investigations. There 
is a fairly general agreement by now that in the 
conquest of disease the healing and strengthening 
of the mind of man (using the word “ mind ” in its 
widest sense) is going to play an all-important, 
perhaps a decisive, part. This conviction lies 
behind all the different “ faith-healing ” move¬ 
ments that have sprung into being during recent 
years. It is worth adding that we should probably 
be right in regarding these movements as part of 
a very deep and widespread modern revolt in the 
interests of the spiritual against the materialistic 
bias of the nineteenth century. 

*57 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


I 

What should be the Christian theory and practice 
with regard to health and disease ? These pages 
are an attempt to answer that question. First of 
all, the Christian revelation of God would seem to 
suggest this clear guiding principle : that God’s will 
for man is that he should be whole and sound in 
body and mind. How indeed could God con¬ 
ceivably “ will ” the alternative—a child with 
paralysis, a woman dying of cancer, a sanatorium 
full of consumptives, and so on ? How can “ Chris¬ 
tians ” still continue to think and speak of these 
things as being “ the will of God ” ? If Christ is 
a true guide, disease is not normal but abnormal, 
and Christian “ salvation ” is intended to be for 
body as well as “ soul.” The “ abundant life ” 
which Christ brought, and brings, to men would 
be sadly incomplete if it had nothing to do with 
men’s bodies. If it is true that God made man in 
His own image, if it is true that on this earth God 
actually showed Himself to men as a human being 
with a human body, then there must surely be 
some great purpose of good for man’s physical 
frame as well as for his moral character. 

There is, in this connection, a fact about the 
earthly life of Jesus Christ which has a remarkable 
significance. It is that He attacked disease wherever 
He found it, as being an evil thing, and commissioned 
His disciples to do the same. He seemed to see 
disease as failure in wholeness and completeness. 
He was at pains to make men understand that God 
concerns Himself with physical things as well as 
158 


CHRISTIANITY AND HEALTH 


spiritual, and that it is within the scheming of His 
love and care that a man’s body should be fed and 
clothed and duly cared for . 1 It is not that He 
isolated physical need and ministered to it as a 
separate thing. He knew, and in all His healing 
work acted on the knowledge, that soul and body 
form together one animate organism. He forgave 
a man’s sins and healed his disease as integral parts 
of one process . 2 Nor did He ever isolate man’s 
“ soul,” as if the saving of it has nothing to do with 
the tenement of clay it inhabits. The ascetics who, 
in the name of religion, have ignored or despised the 
body, or even maltreated it in revolting and de¬ 
grading fashion, have misunderstood Christianity 
and have much to learn from psychology. Not so 
are man’s greatest moral and mental conquests 
achieved. As many of us know, from experiences 
sometimes humiliating, mental health and physical 
health are very closely related. “ A man cannot,” 
someone has said, “ be a saint, a poet, or a lover 
unless he has recently had something to eat.” It is 
not impossible, as I shall hope to show later on, to 
extract good out of the evil of illness; but that does 
not in the least mean that invalids are more likely 
to be good and pious than hearty people with robust 
health. Jesus seems to have given no countenance 
to the idea “ that sickness is an affliction sent by 
God in order that the poor in spirit might become 
more godly.” 3 He came to liberate human per- 

1 Cf. Luke xii. 22 f. 

2 Cf. the healing of the paralytic “ borne of four ” in Mark ii., 
and other instances. 

3 L. Dougall, The Interpreter , Vol. XVI. No. 1, p. 40. 

159 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


sonality from the fetters, physical and moral, which 
bind it and cramp it; the Kingdom of God which 
He came to found was clearly to be begun on earth, 
and was intended to involve the redemption of man 
and of his material environment. This sacredness 
of physical personality was well understood by St. 
Paul and the early Christians, even if the Church 
has allowed it to become obscured since. “ Know 
ye not,” cries St. Paul—and his protest is as 
timely to-day as it was when he uttered it— 
“ that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost 
which is in you ? . . . Therefore glorify God in 
your body.” 1 


II 

This interdependence of body and soul is, after 
all, in harmony with the great sacramental principle 
that runs all through the universe, the principle 
that matter is, always and everywhere, the expres¬ 
sion of spirit. The glory of a sunset can never be 
described or defined in terms of the physical occur¬ 
rences which are its immediate cause. A picture 
has a meaning far beyond the mere marks of pigment 
on canvas of which it materially consists. The 
significance of a sonata of Beethoven is to be found 
not in the piano’s leaping notes and vibrating strings, 
but in the mind activity of composer, player and 
listener. This marriage of mind and spirit reaches 
a wonderful climax in the human body. The 

1 i Corinthians vi. 19, 20. The words which follow in A.V., 
“ and in your spirit, which are God’s,” are of doubtful genuine¬ 
ness ; they do not occur in some MSS. 

160 


CHRISTIANITY AND HEALTH 


brain and the nerves of the body are themselves 
indescribably marvellous; but when we ask how 
what we call a “ thought ” arises or is stored in a 
material brain-cell, we find ourselves in the presence 
of a mystery that has never yet been explained. 
“ We not only do not know,” says one who has 
made a very close study of this subject , 1 “ we cannot 
even imagine, how a thought can be registered in a 
speck of protoplasm, or how a sensation can travel 
along a fibre. How can matter think ? Or how 
can a syllogism store itself in a cell ? There is 
no analogy to help us in the understanding of this. 
We could understand a ghost thinking, perhaps, 
because thought is a spiritual process. But how can 
a combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and 
nitrogen think, or feel, or aspire, or be sorry ? 
We look at some minute filament of a neuron under 
the microscope, and we ask, How can the sensation 
of pain be carried along this, and how can pain be 
felt by the cell to which it runs ? We look at the 
grey matter of the brain and we ask, How can 
millions of memories be impressed upon its millions 
of cells ? And all such questions resolve themselves 
into the one mystery that spirit is incarnate in 
matter, that a brain cell is not merely what we can 
see, but is also something else and something 
infinitely more important.” 

Now it is both common sense and common 
practice to use things without being able neces¬ 
sarily to understand them fully. Many of us would 
have to do without food and heat and light if our 

1 Dr. Percy Dearmer, Body and Soul , p. 24. The whole book is 
a most useful guide to a difficult subject. 

M l6l 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


use of these necessities depended on our being able 
personally to comprehend the science of them. 
Similarly we may safely accept and act on the 
principle that the mind rules the body; and that 
the most hopeful way to maintain health and cure 
disease is to help the mind to fulfil its proper 
function. This mental guidance and guardianship 
of the body is for the greater part carried out by 
the subconscious mind, which oversees most of the 
normal physical functions of the body without our 
having consciously to bother about them at all. 
It is with this under-mind that the doctor must 
co-operate if his assistance is to be effectual. When 
anyone is ill, it is, ultimately, “ something within ” 
that does the healing, with much or little stimulus 
and assistance from outside. There is a deep truth 
in the common expression, “ Let Nature do her 
work.” Dr. Dearmer quotes a considered medical 
opinion which admits that “ but for the natural 
tendencies of the body towards health when dis¬ 
turbed by disease, the art of healing could not 
exist.” 1 “ Medical science only becomes possible,” 

says Mr. Harold Anson , 2 “ when there is an implicit 
belief that disease is not intended to happen and 
therefore is curable.” 

This dominating part played by the under-mind 
in the promotion and maintenance of health does 

1 Op. cit., p. 73. 

2 See his brief and excellent pamphlet on the whole subject, 
Prayer and Bodily Health , Guild of Health Pamphlet, No. 18. 
(Address: 3 Bedford Square, W.C.i. Mr. Anson is chairman of 
the Guild, which seeks to study and promote the exercise of healing 
by spiritual means. It publishes books and pamphlets, and a 
quarterly magazine.) 


162 


CHRISTIANITY AND HEALTH 


not in the least mean, as some mind-cure move¬ 
ments have mistakenly taken it to mean, that the 
arts of the physician and surgeon can forthwith be 
dispensed with. Many of the factors in disease, as 
in accidents, are purely material; bad drains, filthy 
houses, foul air, poisonous or unsuitable food, disease 
germs carried and spread by insects or by human 
beings. It is said to be a fact that “ colds ” are 
never found in the Arctic regions, or where there 
is no infection from people living in insanitary 
conditions. All these causes of disease are remov¬ 
able and will be removed when human apathy, 
human wrong-doing, and human ignorance cease, 
and men learn to co-operate wfith God to make 
His will effective in the world. And the material 
factor is not confined to physical environment. 
There are constantly, in men’s bodies, obstructions 
that may be removed, poisons counteracted, mend¬ 
ings and adjustments and joinings manipulated by 
the surgeon’s skill or the physician’s prescription; 
all such material assistance having, as already sug¬ 
gested, the main purpose of co-operating with 
Nature’s own healing forces. It is both unscien¬ 
tific and un-Christian to suppose any antithesis 
between “ spiritual healing ” and the work of the 
medical profession. 

Of recent years much investigation has been made 
of a further and even more effective way in which 
the under-mind can be assisted to carry on its 
health-giving work, and that is the way of what is 
known as “ suggestion.” There are many kinds of 
“ suggestion ” that come within the experience of 
all of us. Constantly seen advertisements, not 
163 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 

perhaps consciously noticed, make a “ suggestion ” 
to our minds on the strength of which we buy a 
certain soap or travel by a certain route. From 
newspapers, from common talk, from the observed 
habits and practices of other people, we frequently 
receive “ suggestions ” which, without our realizing 
it, profoundly modify our own thought and con¬ 
duct. This extreme susceptibility of the under¬ 
mind has for a long time been utilized by doctors 
in the interests of health and healing; the scientific 
application of deliberate suggestion to another 
mind, both in hypnosis and otherwise, has already 
proved, in the hands of a skilful practitioner, an 
immense boon to many a patient. Recent inves¬ 
tigation and experiment have gone further, and 
have shown that it is quite possible for the ordinary 
person, if he sets about it in the right way, to 
increase considerably his physical well-being, and 
even (to some extent) to cure illness, not by pas¬ 
sively receiving “ suggestions ” from others, but by 
himself “ suggesting ” to his own subconscious 
mind. This practice of auto-suggestion , as taught 
by M. Coue and the New Nancy School, has 
proved to have a potency in promoting health and 
overcoming disease which is beyond dispute. And 
numbers have found it wonderfully effective in 
building up a stronger character and keener mind 
as well as a healthier body. Perhaps its secret lies 
largely in its fundamental common-sense. As 
Mr. Pym says in his admirable book, Psychology and 
the Christian Life (the quotation is a useful summary, 
in ordinary language, of what “ suggestion ” is and 
does): “ Our own individual experience proves to 
164 


CHRISTIANITY AND HEALTH 

us . . . [the practical power of ‘ suggestion 
Again and again I have done a difficult thing 
which, humanly speaking, depended on my own 
efforts, because, as I am convinced, I set out with 
the certainty that I could do it; in so approaching 
the task I was suggesting to myself that it ‘ could 
be done,’ c was as good as done.’ Again and again 
I have failed at the same thing through no conscious 
slackening of effort, but simply because I approached 
it despondently— 6 1 suppose I must tackle this, 
but. . . On those ‘ buts ’ hang my failures in 
rows. Nothing will convince me of any other 
explanation of my experience than this: in making 
the suggestion to myself ‘ I can,’ I set in motion 
the wheels of a machinery whose driving-power 
helped to achieve success; the idea of success was 
transformed into successful action. When I sug¬ 
gested to myself at the outset doubtful success or 
practically certain failure, I shut the doors on power 
at my disposal, or, worse, initiated an idea which 
in spite of my efforts translated itself into actual 
failure. Many of us by personal experience have 
come to realize this ; when we read it in psychologi¬ 
cal books we murmur, ‘ Exactly so. I’ve always 
thought as much.’ But there is more to learn. 
This power can be wielded more deliberately. 
There are certain times when we are in a more 
receptive state for such suggestions than we are at 
others. Again, the state in which we are most 
receptive can be induced deliberately by ourselves; 
we can select the ideas which shall be introduced 
or suggested for our subconscious mind to trans¬ 
form into fact. We can gain greater control. We 
165 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


can discard worthless habits and fashion useful ones. 
We can develop capacities which we did not for¬ 
merly believe to exist in us. We can unlock 
reserves of power hitherto unrealized.” 1 


III 

It is, then, broadly true to say that there resides 
in everybody a deep-down “ force ” or “ life 
energy ” which makes for health, 2 and which is 
capable of stimulus and direction. Now a Chris¬ 
tian, considering this fact and some of its rami¬ 
fications, may well ask himself the question, “ Where 
does God come in in this mind healing ? ” In 
answer to this question it may be frankly stated, 
first of all, that the mind can, and often does, with 
or without the assistance of doctor or “ healer 99 or 
other agency, set this subterranean force at work 
without any conscious reference to God at all. 
Further, it is quite possible for the healing process 
to be accompanied by what a Christian would 
regard as entirely erroneous ideas of God and Christ 
and the universe. “ Christian Science ” is a case 
in point. No one would deny that Christian 
Science has brought new health and hope to many 
a broken man and woman. But, despite its name, 

1 Psychology and the Christian Life, pp. 27, 28. For an account 
of auto-suggestion and M. Coue’s methods the reader should con¬ 
sult Suggestion and Auto-suggestion , by Baudouini. 

2 For simplicity’s sake I describe in terms of a thing that which 
is, to speak more accurately, a relation. 

166 


CHRISTIANITY AND HEALTH 


it mixes up with its healing work views and theories 
which are neither Christian nor scientific. It is 
touched with pantheism ; it believes in an irrational 
dualism of matter and spirit; drawing a sharp 
distinction between the “ historical Jesus ” and the 
“ Christ of ideal truth,” it recognizes no real 
Incarnation; and, denying the reality of sin, it 
has no place in its creed for the cross of Christ. 
There are other “ New Thought ” societies, and 
“ health ” prophets, who likewise are responsible 
for some good, with much error and some evil 
mixed in with it. With regard to all these move¬ 
ments and experiments, Christ gives His followers 
two clear bits of advice. On the one hand, He 
warns us that men may have wonderful psychic 
and healing powers without goodness; because 
someone is able to make us well it does not in the 
least follow that he is a true guide to God and the 
things of God. 1 On the other hand, He warns us 
against belittling or despising those who cast out 
devils in His name, because they do not share 
our views of Him. 2 But, whatever their religious 
views, He would clearly condemn those who, in 
practice, seek bodily health for purely selfish ends. 
No follower of the Crucified can have anything to 
do with a mere gospel of comfort; and that is what, 
thinly disguised as religion, the message of some of 
the newest healing movements amount to. “ There 
are whole schools of thought,” caustically comments 
Dr. Dearmer, “ to whom the last word of a really 

1 Cf. Matt. vii. 22, 23, R.V. marg. “ Powers ” and “ works ” 
are technical New Testament words to describe healing miracles. 

2 Luke ix. 49, 50. 


167 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


spiritual religion is that people should murmur to 
themselves, ‘ Health, Wealth, Beauty/ while 
dressing in the morning.” 1 
What then should be the distinctively Christian 
view and practice in these matters ? I should 
answer thus: the Christian recognizes that this 
mystic force in man that makes for health is God’s 
own gift, is indeed part of the very life of God; 
and, humbly and confidently, he claims that gift, 
not just because it is pleasant to feel well, but in 
order that he may bring a whole and fit personality, 
fit in body and soul, to the service of God and His 
Kingdom. It may well be asked, How far are 
Christians generally availing themselves of this 
tremendous possibility ? Are not large numbers 
living far below their potential level of vitality for 
body and soul? It must honestly be confessed 
that there has been serious failure here, individually 
and corporately. Again and again we sit down 
under the dominance of disease and call it pious 
resignation when we ought to fight and conquer it. 
There are thousands of saintly men and women who, 
contracting an illness, passively and thoughtlessly 
accept it as the will of God when they ought, from 
the very first moment of its onset, to enlist the 
mighty Divine resources against it. Many religious 
people, when they suffer from bodily ailments, put 
much more faith in diet and drugs than they do in 
prayer. We see that sin is not God’s Will; Christ 
would have us see that likewise disease is not His 
Will, and would have us use a faith, individually and 
jointly, that means an opening up of the whole 
1 Op. cit., p. 209. 

168 


CHRISTIANITY AND HEALTH 


being to God, an invasion by His Spirit of every 
recess, physical and spiritual, of the entire per¬ 
sonality. That is the Christian’s ideal—a God- 
filled personality, not for health’s sake, but for 
God’s sake, and for the sake of his brother men. 
That motive of service will lead him into situations 
of physical strain and contagious disease which the 
mere devotee of health would cautiously avoid; 
but in those situations, as in all the changes and 
chances of daily life, his receptiveness of the Life 
of God will give him a power of endurance, an 
immunity from illness, a deep unruffled peace of 
mind, 1 a strong, clean wholeness in body and spirit, 
that will make him a purveyor of health and happi¬ 
ness wherever he goes. “ Seek ye first the kingdom 
of God, and all these things shall be added unto 
you.” In this same connection it may be pointed 
out that on the Christian lies the duty, not only of 
fighting sickness with faith, but also, in his ordinary 
daily life, of taking pains to keep fit, to be at his 
best physically, in order the better to play the part 
and do the work that God has given him. We 
should hear much less of “ nerves ” and breakdowns 
and over-strain, especially in the whole field of 
“ religious ” service, if people—particularly middle- 
aged people—would treat their bodies with a 
judicious blend of faith and common-sense; if, for 
instance, they took more care (without fussiness) 

1 The late William James, the great psychologist, has said: 
“ The sovereign cure for worry is religious faith.” Cf. Creative 
Prayer , p. 32 : “ To the soul that is wholly bent upon God, a 
thousand fretting cares and vexing problems which tear the lives 
of others in pieces simply cease to exist.” 

169 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


about rest and sleep and diet and fresh air and 
exercise and recreation. It is wonderful what a run 
before breakfast, or some good exercises before and 
after the bath, will do not only for the digestion, 
but for a man’s prayer capacity. 

It must be admitted that these aspects of Christian 
living and Christian service have not always been 
duly emphasized by the Church, which has preached 
a “ salvation ” that has had little to do with the 
body or bodily conditions; hence the enormous 
success of healing movements outside the Church. 
There are, at last, welcome signs of a change coming. 
And it may come to pass, in a generation, if the 
Church can be true to Christ and swift to meet 
men’s needs, that religion and science will at last 
work hand in hand in the conquest of disease and 
the betterment of all physical life . 1 

1 For a discussion of Spiritual Healing and the Church, the 
reader is referred to Dr. Dearmer’s book, already quoted; also 
to the Report of the 1920 Lambeth Conference, pp. 42 f., 122 f. 

Cf. an article by the Rev. Dr. S. McComb in the Contemporary 
Review , April 1922, in the course of which he says : “ One of the 
most remarkable signs of the awakening spiritual life of the Church 
in our time is the revival of healing through spiritual agencies. 
Prayer-healing and faith-healing movements are part of the modern 
revolt against the materialistic bias of the nineteenth century, 
but more specifically they are partly owing to our new knowledge 
of the life of Jesus and of the nature of His ministry, and partly 
to an effort to recover the spirit and power of the Christian religion 
as these were revealed in the Apostolic and post-Apostolic periods.” 


170 


CHRISTIANITY AND HEALTH 


IV 

At this point a question emerges to which an 
answer must be sought. If, as has been strongly 
asserted, health is God’s Will, then why is there so 
much disease ? And why do Christians seem to be 
as liable to illness as other people ? The plain and 
obvious answer is that a vast proportion of the 
people in the world, through wilful wrong-doing or 
through ignorance, are living out of harmony with 
the Will of God and disobeying those laws, moral 
and physical, which condition soundness in body 
and mind. It is safe to say that all the disease in 
the world is due to sin or ignorance or to a blend 
of both. Indeed, as Mr. Anson points out, ignorance 
is often more terribly punished than sin; and the 
guiltless suffer with the guilty. “ The bad building 
of the Tower of Siloam does mean that it falls 
some day on casual passers-by, and anyone, good or 
bad, may be involved in the ruin.” It is selfishness 
or thoughtlessness or sheer lack of knowledge that 
causes or tolerates the conditions—whether a filthy 
house or an overcrowded room, or an ill-ventilated 
factory, or a mosquito-breeding stagnant pool—in 
which disease germs thrive; and it is a similar 
cause that makes the human body an easy prey to 
their attack. In such a close environment of sin 
and disease it may well be difficult, if not impossible, 
for any particular individual to maintain perfect 
health, especially if, as a Christian, he refuses to 
escape from unhealthy circumstances; he will claim 
his health from God in the midst of his lot wherever 
171 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


it may lie. Accordingly, while Christianity does 
unquestionably make for health, it does not follow 
that if you are ill you are therefore irreligious. 
Health is not necessarily a sign of spirituality, nor is 
suffering necessarily the direct result of personal 
sin. Indeed the suffering caused by sin falls much 
more often on the innocent than on the guilty; 
the misery and disease and death caused by drunken¬ 
ness or vice or war fall not chiefly on those who do 
the sin or cause the war, but on the drunkard’s 
family and the profligate’s children and on the 
men who fight, together with those who mourn 
their wounds or death. 

Suppose then, despite a truly Christian endeavour 
to take hold of the Life of God for body as well as 
soul, you find yourself on your back with influenza, 
or laid aside for some time with some serious illness 
or disease, what is to be done about it ? I suggest 
that the Christian attitude is to go on believing, to 
the uttermost, that God means you to be well, and 
to persist in every attempt, conscious and sub¬ 
conscious, to take hold of His life and health. If, 
through causes within or without you which you 
cannot ascertain or remove, the illness persists, then 
for your strength and courage and comfort, you 
have the certainty that God in Christ stands by 
you in your trial; He is all the time utterly with 
you in these physical conditions for which neither 
He nor (so far as you can see) yourself are respon¬ 
sible. And to have Him by you, on a sick bed or 
in a trench waiting for a shell, infecting you with 
courage and hope and enabling you to see your own 
little bit of trouble over against the whole landscape 
172 


CHRISTIANITY AND HEALTH 


of life and the great sky of His love overhead—that 
is the way in which you may quite certainly extract 
good out of a bad situation. “ Thou, Lord, art 
my hope; Thou has set my house of defence very 
high.” “ There shall no evil happen unto thee. . . 

“ If God be for us who can be against us ? ” Both 
Old and New Testaments are full of the faith that 
sees God in the night. Suffering can degrade; 
but, as St. Paul with his “ thorn in the flesh ” and 
many Christians since have found, it equally can 
ennoble, and unveil to the seeking soul Him for 
whom suffering was the condition of His work and 
the threshold of His glory. 


V 

I would emphasize once more, in a few closing 
sentences, the need, in the matter of which this 
chapter treats, for a new quality of faith : a faith 
which approximates more closely to the faith of 
Jesus Himself. He clearly meant, and means, us 
to draw upon the limitless resources of the eternal 
God in something of the way in which He himself 
did this. In the last resort, our failure in fighting 
sin and disease is due to lack of belief in God. We 
so easily tend to think of faith almost entirely in 
terms of theology, or as an attitude of spirit essen¬ 
tially passive; whereas faith really involves a 
tremendous uprising of the whole personality to 
take hold of God; it is, in Dr. Dearmer’s lucid 
phrasing, “ the deliberate opening of the whole 
spirit to God, the making of our entire human 
173 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


nature—reason, memory, emotion, imagination, 
intuition, love—into a channel of communication 
with God; it uses all the capacities of man for this 
Divine friendship; what speech and sight, and 
touch, and mutual thought are between lovers, 
that is faith between man and God.” 

A man with faith like this wields a power for 
good far beyond the confines of his own character. 
He becomes a veritable distributing centre of the 
Life of God; he creates an atmosphere of health 
and happiness wherever he goes; he infects his 
fellow-men with courage and energy and hope in 
the age-long battle with evil and leads them on to 
victory. This kind of man brings more stones for 
the building of the City of God than all its pro¬ 
fessional architects and masons of his generation. 


m 


CHAPTER X 

CHRISTIANITY AND BEAUTY 


" Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, neither do 
they spin; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory 
was not arrayed like one of these.”— St. Luke xii. 27. 


“ Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty .”—Isaiah xxxiii. 17. 

" I thought that I had lost Thee; but behold 1 
Thou comest to me from the horizon low. 

Across the fields outspread with green and gold— 

Fair carpet for Thy feet to come and go. 

Whence I know not, or how to me Thou art come !— 

Not less my spirit with calm bliss doth glow, 

Meeting Thee only thus, in nature vague and dumb.” 

George Macdonald. 

“ From sky to sod 

The world’s unfolded blossom smells of God.” 

Francis Thompson. 

*' The beautiful is essentially the spiritual making itself known 
sensuously.”—G. R. Appleton. 


** The universe is to be valued because there is truth in it and 
beauty in it; and we live to discover the truth and the beauty 
no less than to do what is right.”— Clutton Brock. 


** O then indeed I knew how closely knit 
To stars and flowers we are;—how many means 
Of grace there are for those that never lose 
Their sense of membership in this divine 
Body of God;—for those that all their days 
Have walked in quiet communion with the Life 
That keeps the common secret of the sun. 

The wind, the silence and the heart of man. 
There is one God, one Love, one everlasting 
Mystery of Incarnation, one creative 
Passion behind the many-coloured veil.” 

Alfred Noyes. 


CHAPTER X 


CHRISTIANITY AND BEAUTY 

I 

I am writing these lines in the kind of spot not 
usually found except in one’s very joiliest dreams. 
I am sitting, with my back against a comfortable 
boulder, on a little “ alp ” or pasture half-way up 
a Swiss mountain. All about me is the fragrance of 
the flowers and the grass and the pines. Close 
beside me stands a small hay chalet, with its steep 
sloping roof and its wooden sides stained a delicious 
warm brown by the ardent kisses of the sun. Just 
below it I can see the tops of the pine trees; and 
far away beneath them in the green valley below 
I can descry the silver ribbon of the tumbling 
river and hear its flowing music, mingling with the 
distant chimes of a tiny church in the village which 
clings precariously to the steep side of the mountain 
opposite. Some of the great peaks are visible, with 
filmy, silvery clouds washing round their lower 
battlements; between the peaks and through the 
clouds are blue distances which gradually lose them¬ 
selves in the blue of heaven itself. My home in 
England is in a land of flats and fens; to climb 
among these mountains is an ascending of sacred 
n 177 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


stairs to the high places where Beauty dwells, 
where the Throne of the Presence is set up. . . . 
These shining peaks and deep valleys say things 
which even my dull perceptions can hardly miss; 
up here I know, what in an ugly street I only guess 
at, that “ His mercy reacheth unto the heavens and 
His faithfulness unto the clouds, that His righteous¬ 
ness standeth like the strong mountains, His 
judgments are like the great deep.” 

Nearly a year has elapsed since I sat on that 
Swiss alp, thinking . . . and those threads of 
thought are not for picking up anyhow, anywhere. 
Now, with early summer come round again, I have 
escaped for one day from the daily round and 
ceaseless toil, like a swimmer under water coming 
up to breathe, and for a few hours have fled away 
as far as might be from bricks and mortar. . . . 
Surely there never was such a wonderful bursting 
into summer as has befallen this year, when, after 
those long bleak weeks through March and April 
spring and summer have suddenly met and kissed 
each other amid a blaze of beauty and a riot of 
colour such as even England can hardly have often 
seen. I write in a shady nook in one of England’s 
most stately and historic parks; the trees are 
dressed in the softest, shimmering green, with cool, 
velvet shadows on the turf beneath them, and 
between them vistas of gentle grassy slopes against 
a far background of misty blue where sky and 
horizon meet. The lanes through which I have 
passed are lined with red and white may, the woods 
are spread with carpets of bluebells, the river 
178 


CHRISTIANITY AND BEAUTY 


meadows with their buttercups are, each of them, 
a fresh-made field of the cloth of gold. It is one 
of those days when “ in His Temple everything 
saith, Glory.” 1 The beauty of it all stabs at one’s 
heart; there are no words to describe it, no artist 
could paint it; there is no answer to it save the deep, 
silent, reverent worship of one’s inmost soul. . . . 

Through the big west door, standing open, I can 
see the evening shadows lying right across the wide 
lawns. Here, within, all is dim; the wonderful 
groined roof is only mistily visible; the great 
screen with its precious burden, that divine organ, 
looms up dark against the faint glow beyond, while 
through the opening, the curtains drawn aside, a 
dim pathway of soft light leads towards the unseen 
recesses of the chapel’s further end. A perfect 
setting for perfect sounds! Those organ notes, 
mellow and true, send their waves of pure resonance 
washing along the ancient walls, waves that surely 
are born in the very deeps of music and will only 
break on the shores of eternity. And then the 
angels sing—or so it seems. From beyond the 
organ screen comes the sound of many voices, a 
running stream of pure melody, a rich blend of 
many-coloured harmony, sequences and cadences of 
the “ unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace ” of 
perfect rhythm. ... I sit there, motionless, spell¬ 
bound, with the music flowing sweetly down into 
the unknown depths of one’s being. . . . 

The chief snare of much thinking and most 

1 Ps. xxix. 9, R.V. 

179 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


writing is the snare of abstractions; of substituting, 
by an easy process, the vague formlessness of the 
abstract for the sharp lines of clear thought and the 
concrete stuff of real experience. Of the wonderful, 
the real connection between Christianity and beauty 
I have no doubt at all, and I believe it is a subject 
which Christians ought to consider; but how write 
anything about it without being merely and feebly 
abstract ? That danger I have endeavoured to 
avoid, so far as the nature of the subject permits it 
to be avoided, by setting down—not without diffi¬ 
dence—these transcripts of bits of one’s own 
experience. Most of us from time to time enjoy 
similar experiences; all of us are aware that we 
cannot attempt to describe or explain these ex¬ 
periences without using the word beauty . Like 
many other words, “ beauty ” is a term that 
describes without explaining. All we know is that 
there is a something about a flower or a landscape, 
a picture or a building, a song or a play, a face or 
a character, which appeals with irresistible force to 
our deepest instincts, and which has an amazing 
power to charm and heal and inspire and bless. 
We call this something “ beauty,” though we cannot 
define our word; our delight in beauty, like our 
delight in a joke, is indefinable, being joy in “ a 
final good,” “ ultimate pleasure in something that 
cannot be explained.” 


II 

Now this chapter is not an essay on the meaning 
of beauty; that would be a task absurdly beyond 
180 


CHRISTIANITY AND BEAUTY 


the powers of the present writer, nor would it be 
of any great interest to those who I hope will read 
this book. All I want to say, as simply as I can, 
is that God Himself is in, and is the ultimate source 
of, all beauty, just as He is in truth and in goodness 
—those “ three sisters never sundered without 
tears ” ; and that the Christian, so far from finding 
that Christ and beauty are in some sort of antithesis, 
will discover, if he seek aright, that his love of 
Christ and his sense of the beautiful are interwoven 
in a close and living bond. In Charles Kingsley’s 
memorable words—and he was a lover of the 
beautiful beyond most men—“ Beauty is God’s 
handwriting; welcome it therefore in every fair 
face, every fair sky, every fair flower, and thank 
Him for it who is the fountain of all loveliness.” 
These large statements are hardly susceptible of 
proof; yet I cannot but think that they would 
be endorsed by all who, in beauty, look for what 
is spiritual. Clutton Brock, whose teaching on 
beauty and art, and their relation to religion, is 
justly making a deep impression on many minds 
to-day, boldly claims that all true perception of 
beauty depends on a sense of the personal in nature, 
that the real significance of an artist’s work lies in 
his attempt “ to express the personal in that which 
is not himself,” and that “ our joy in his art is a 
joy in that sense of the personal everywhere which 
he communicates to us.” 1 The myths and fancies 
about water-nymphs and fairies bring us, he claims, 

1 See his valuable essay on “ Spiritual Experience,” in The 
Spirit, ed. by B. H. Streeter. 

181 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


closer to the heart of things than scientific definitions 
and aesthetic analysis. 

But if Nature is in any sense “ personal,” what 
else can this personal quality be but an expression, 
in terms of Beauty, of the living, loving, eternal 
God ? If the pattern of the lily, the exquisite 
wings of the butterfly, the unpaintable glories of 
the sunset, seem to show design, whose design is 
it but His ? If they suggest some Mind, beyond 
our little minds, to take delight in them, whose is 
the Mind, whose the delight, but His ? Not indeed 
that Nature, or beauty, can ever be a complete and 
adequate expression of what God is; for that there 
was needed the further, fuller revelation in a 
human life. But if the Christian outlook on God 
and the world is the true one, then (to use for 
once a theological term) God is “ immanent ” in 
His creation, and there is a real sense in which the 
flower, the sunset, the picture, the building, the 
music are actually expressions of His Spirit. “ If 
He exists at all, the uttermost beauty, the most 
extreme enchantment, must be His.” The Bible 
is full of this conception. The growing knowledge 
of God brought with it a keen sense of His mani¬ 
festation in nature : “ He cutteth out rivers among 
the rocks; and His eye seeth every precious thing ” ; 1 
“ O Lord, how manifold are Thy works! in wisdom 
hast Thou made them all; the earth is full of Thy 
riches ”; 2 —the Psalms are full of such passages. 
“ Then was I (the ‘ Wisdom 9 of God, personified) 
by Him (in His creative work) as a master work¬ 
man . . . rejoicing in His habitable earth ” ; 3 and 
1 Job xxviii. io. 2 Ps. civ. 24. 3 Prov. viii. 30. 

182 


CHRISTIANITY AND BEAUTY 


St. Paul carries the same thought further: “ All 
things have been created by Him (Christ) and for 
Him . . . and all coheres in Him.” 1 More than 
all, Christ Himself, in His earthly life, was so evi¬ 
dently sure that this earth was His Father’s earth, 
and that everything true and good and beautiful 
had its own place in His Father’s Kingdom. Notice, 
in this connection, not only His memorable words 
about the beauty of the lilies, but the eye for nature 
that He shows in His parables, and the way in which 
He clearly loved to be alone with nature—it may 
well be that, when He climbed the hills to pray, 
He was drawn as much by the birds and the flowers 
as by the solitude. 

And yet there are those who think that Christ 
comes as an enemy to all that gives life colour and 
beauty ! Swinburne, speaking doubtless for many 
a modern “ pagan,” cries out in fear: 

“ Wilt thou yet take all, Galilaean ? But these thou shalt not take, 

The laurel, the palms, and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs 
in the brake : 

Breasts more soft than a dove’s, that tremble with tenderer 
breath; 

And all the wings of the loves; and all the joy before death... 

The poet is wrong. It is “ the living God ” Him¬ 
self “ who richly provides us with all the enjoy¬ 
ments of life.” 2 Christ, calling men away from 
the routine of their petty lives into the adventure 
of love, leaves the pagan far behind in the quest 
for the true glory of human living; and He sees 
more beauty than the other in the nearest flower 
for that He knows it to be fashioned and painted 
1 Col. i. 16 (Moffatt). 2 i Tim. vi. 17 (Moffatt). 

183 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


by the finger of the living God. Apart from 
questions of technical excellence, those poets who 
have this sense of the “ immanence ” of God get 
far nearer to the very heart of Beauty. Take, for 
instance, these lines by that true mystic, “ Evelyn 
Underhill ” : 

a I come in the little things, 

Saith the Lord: 

Not borne on morning wings 
Of majesty, but I have set My Feet 
Amidst the delicate and bladed wheat 
That springs triumphant in the furrowed sod. 

There do I dwell, in weakness and in power; 

Not broken or divided, saith our God ! 

In your strait garden plot I come to flower : 

About your porch My Vine, 

Meek, fruitful, doth entwine; 

Waits, at the threshold, Love’s appointed hour. 

I come in the little things, 

Saith the Lord: 

Yea ! on the glancing wings 

Of eager birds, the softly pattering feet 

Of furred and gentle beasts, I come to meet 

Your hard and wayward heart. In brown bright eyes 

That peep from out the brake, I stand confest. 

On every nest 

Where feathery Patience is content to brood 
And leaves her pleasure for the high emprize 
Of motherhood— 

There doth My Godhead rest. 

I come in the little things, 

Saith the Lord : 

My starry wings 
I do forsake, 

Love’s highway of humility to take : 

Meekly I fit my stature to your need. 

In beggar’s part 


184 


CHRISTIANITY AND BEAUTY 


About your gates I shall not cease to plead— 
As man, to speak with man— 

Till by such art 

I shall achieve My Immemorial Plan, 

Pass the low lintel of the human heart.” 1 


III 

This book is about every-day religion. I would 
make the confident assertion that the man who 
learns to bring Christ into his every-day life is far 
more keenly appreciative of all lovely things than 
he ever could be without Him. With the springs 
of his being made new and clean, he finds himself 
in blessed harmony with all the beauties of earth 
and sky: 

“ O glory of the lighted mind— 

How dead Pd been, how dumb, how blind. 

The running brook, to my new eyes, 

Was babbling out of Paradise; 

The waters rushing from the rain 

Were singing, Christ has risen again. . . .” 2 

There is no joy in life like that of walking with the 
living Jesus by the blue sea, or through the wood’s 
green glades, or in the rose garden. . . . Those are 
the times when you touch and hold life’s final 
certainties. 

“ Not God ! in gardens! when the eve is cool ! 

Nay, but I have a sign. 

’Tis very sure God walks in mine.” 3 


1 Evelyn Underhill, Immanence , p. I (Dent). 

2 Masefield, The Everlasting Mercy. 3 T. E. Brown. 

185 



EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


That is a sensitiveness to beauty and to God which 
grows—and the Christian will take care that it has 
the chance to grow. As towards truth and good¬ 
ness, so towards beauty, he will seek to be increas¬ 
ingly teachable, open-eyed, receptive. And he will 
find that earth’s fair things will minister more and 
more to the needs and longings of his soul, and 
help him along some of life’s darkest ways; he will 
learn with Keats, that 

“ in spite of all 

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall 
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon. 

Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon 
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils 
With the green world they live in; and clear rills 
That for themselves a cooling covert make 
’Gainst the hot season; 

All lovely tales that we have heard or read 
An endless fountain of immortal drink, 

Pouring into us from the heaven’s brink.” 1 

For those things to heal and bless, a man must 
keep his spiritual eyes and pores open; and the 
greatest danger of preoccupied, heavy middle-age is 
to allow these apertures to become closed up, to 
let the finer instincts and faculties gradually atrophy. 
It is a dread fate to become impenetrable; pray 
rather for anything, pain or pleasure, that will 
“ stab your spirit broad awake.” 

There are very many points in life where religion 
and beauty meet. One is the sheer beauty of 
goodness. There is that about goodness, or at 
least about certain types of goodness, which can 
only be described by borrowing the language of 
1 From Endymion. 

186 


CHRISTIANITY AND BEAUTY 


beauty. A mother caring selflessly for her tiny 
babe, a friendship steadfast through bitter circum¬ 
stance, a soldier giving his life for his comrades, a 
lover faithful unto death—these things are beautiful 
as well as good. Indeed is self-sacrificing love ever 
anything but beautiful ? And has this world ever 
seen anything more morally exquisite than the life 
and death of Jesus Christ ? Perhaps the worst 
fault of many of us Christians is that we have made 
goodness dull, righteousness unattractive. Yet 
when, here and there, now and again, a human 
life catches something of the goodness of Christ 
Himself, that life shines with a beauty that the 
dullest can see and which even the unrighteous 
admire. “ Let the beauty of the Lord our God 
be upon us,” 1 is a request which many respectable 
churchgoers might fitly include in their prayers. 

Man has always a strong instinct to express his 
ideal of beauty, both in the life he lives and in the 
things he makes. The attempt to do the latter is 
what we call “ art ”; meaning by art not the 
inventing of adornment or decoration, but “ the 
whole business of creative fashioning wherein hand 
and brain work together.” The vision of Beauty 
together with the attempt to express it is the 
impulse and the significance of all art—painting, 
sculpture, architecture, music, literature, the drama ; 
it was in the mind of the builder of the Parthenon, 
and of the writer of the twenty-third Psalm, and 
of the painter of the Sistine Madonna, just as it is 
in the mind of any man who tries to make a common 
pot as well as it can be made. And if this be art, 
1 Ps. xc. 17. 

187 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


and if the argument of this chapter is sound, then 
art is closely connected with the Kingdom of God, 
and it is a concern of Christianity that art should 
be good and not bad; moreover, it is, or ought to 
be, a concern of Christians not to allow the world 
of art to be handed over to modern pagans. 

There is one aspect of this subject which may 
fitly be emphasized as this chapter closes. That 
is the place of beauty and art in every-day life and 
in the making of the things which man needs for 
common use. We have, in this matter, made some 
advance on the days of our fathers and grandfathers ; 
but one has only to note the devastating ugliness of 
much of modern civilization, the bad houses and 
the still worse things they contain, to realize how 
much land there is still to be possessed. When 
shall we learn that “ art ”—in the word’s true 
sense—is not an extra, an expensive luxury of the 
few, but a necessity for all, “ a quality and a virtue 
which ought to be in everything that is made by 
human beings ” ? All men have a deep craving 
for beauty in life and environment, though many 
of them hardly realize their need, and still less 
have they any idea how to satisfy it. As William 
Morris always pointed out, this lack of beauty is 
really a spiritual problem, and is bound up with 
the grave moral defects of the whole structure of 
our society. As we have already seen , 1 one place 
where the problem presses hard is in the kind of 
work that is done by a majority of the population. 
It is evident, as Clutton Brock says somewhere, 
that “ work without beauty means unsatisfied 
1 Chapter V., “ Christianity and Work.” 

188 


CHRISTIANITY AND BEAUTY 


spiritual desire in the worker ” ; but it is also sadly 
evident, as was noted before , 1 that to revolutionize 
the conceptions, character and conditions of labour, 
and especially manual labour, as they obtain to-day 
is going to be a very big task indeed. 

Meanwhile, without any large change of con¬ 
ditions of life and work, there is much that we all 
can do, and, as Christians, ought to do. We might 
well make a beginning upon our own room or home, 
and try to carry out William Morris’s famous 
injunction : “ Have nothing in your house that 
you do not know to be useful or believe to be 
beautiful.” What a bonfire would result! Some 
of the bad stuff, unfortunately, would have to be 
spared, for the time at least, owing to the horrible 
and inevitable connection of short purse and shoddy 
furniture—deal wardrobes painted to look like oak, 
chests of drawers with drawers that won’t shut, 
rickety tables that always stand unevenly, chairs 
that are equally bad to look at or to sit on. But 
there is much else, especially in the “ drawing¬ 
room ” or “ parlour,” that might go at once— 
cheap and bad prints, stuffy curtains and frowsy 
table-cloths, vulgar picture postcards, tawdry mir¬ 
rors, pain-giving wall-papers, meaningless little 
mats and the hideous vases that stand on them, 
and all the clutter of futile and ugly bric-^-brac 
that crowds every inch of space on mantelpiece 
and shelves and small tables. Why don’t we, in 
the name of Beauty, arise in our wrath and cast 
these things away? For they make for a lie; 
they suggest that beauty attaches chiefly to useless 

1 Chapter V. 

189 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


things, or is something you may artificially add to 
useful things; they obscure the great truth that 
good craftsmanship is beauty—that there always is 
beauty in the cunning shaping, the exactly right 
lines and proportions, of anything, whether a table, 
or a cabinet, or a knife, or a bridge, or a motor-car, 
which is perfectly adapted to the use for which it 
is intended . 1 If, when he has to buy furniture or 
other things, a man considers himself inartistic, or 
questions whether he has the requisite “ taste,” 
then let him apply to what he sees the twin test 
of simplicity and fitness for use, and he will not go 
far wrong. And what we do severally in our houses, 
in the interests of beauty, that we must join to¬ 
gether to do, or get done, in our towns and cities, 
and wage relentless war on mean houses, dirty 
streets, unworthy public buildings, ugly and ill- 
placed factories, disfiguring advertisements; ceasing 
to take for granted the grime and smoke and squalor 
and general hideousness, and not resting till we get 
the cleanness and light and space and air and beauty 
which are our rightful heritage. And that not only 
because beauty is for its own sake desirable. It is 
also desirable for its magic influence upon ourselves. 
Who shall say how much of human weariness and 
hopelessness, even of sin and crime, is due to the 
grey and hideous environment in which so many are 
imprisoned ? “ What,” asks Canon L. S. Hunter , 2 

speaking of the desert stretches of our “ East 
Ends,” “ what is the influence of one picture 
gallery on the worker compared with that of his 

1 Cf. above, Chapter V., § II. 

2 The Artist and Religion , p. 23. 

190 


CHRISTIANITY AND BEAUTY 


house, ugly as it is cheap, exactly like its neighbour 
and a hundred more in the same street, each street 
like a hundred others in the same town, and in a 
town like a hundred towns in the same country— 
these hundred thousand homes from which God’s 
skylight and earth’s beauty are foreclosed—where 
all are using the same common crockery, and the 
same common furniture, gathering round the same 
shaped fireplace, mocked by the same patterned 
wall-paper ? ” The vitality, even the moral health, 
of everyone is heightened by beautiful surroundings 
and lowered by ugly ones. Henry Drummond 
once said that “ physical beauty makes moral 
beauty . . a mere touch of it in a room, in a 
street, even in a door-knocker, is a spiritual force.” 

“ If you get simple beauty and nought else, 

You get about the best thing God invents; 

That’s somewhat, and you’ll find the soul you’ve missed 
Within yourself, when you return Him thanks.” 1 

This dream of a common life that shall shine 
with beauty is no mere artist’s fantasy, no faddist’s 
crank; it is the will of God , who bids us look for 
His Kingdom to be realized on earth after the 
pattern in heaven. Therefore the dream can, and 
will, come true. ... In Him, and through Him, 
these longings shall find their final satisfaction. 
For the Kingdom of heaven is the very home and 
centre of all that man finds fair and exquisite and 
desirable, and 

“ in the land of beauty 
All things of beauty meet.” 


1 Robert Browning, Fra Lippo Lippi. 
191 



EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


O God, who art the beauty of the earth, open 
the eyes of our minds that we may see wonderful 
things around us, and open the eyes of our souls 
that with the poets and the prophets we may see 
Thee in everything beautiful and wise. Amen. 


192 


CHAPTER XI 

CHRISTIANITY AND THOUGHT 


O 


Jesus said: " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God . . . with all 
thy mind.”— St. Mark xii. 30. 

“ May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ grant you the spirit of 
wisdom . . . illuminating the eyes of your heart so that you can 
understand the hope to which He calls us .”—Ephesians i. 17 
(Moffatt’s version). 

“ We, the Church, like you [scientists], have our foothold in 
the real world, and are seekers after Truth. There is more than 
one path up the Hill of the Lord. It is only at the top that the 
paths meet, but we are engaged upon the same quest.”— Dean 
Inge. 


*' The Lord hath more light and truth yet to break forth.”— 
John Robinson to the Pilgrim Fathers. 

“ It is not the truth that a man possesses, or believes he possesses, 
but the honest pains he has taken to get at the truth, which makes 
a man’s worth. For it is not by the possession of truth, but by the 
search after it, that his powers are extended, in which alone his 
ever-growing perfection consists. ... If God held all truth in 
His right hand, and in His left hand simply the ever-active en¬ 
deavour after truth—even with the condition that I should ever 
err—and said to me, ‘ Choose ! ’ I should humbly incline to His 
left, and say, 4 Father, give I for perfect truth is, surely, for Thee 
alone l * ”— Lessing. 


CHAPTER XI 


CHRISTIANITY AND THOUGHT 

I 

The title of this chapter is in a certain sense 
descriptive of the whole book, inasmuch as the 
book represents an attempt to think out the appli¬ 
cation of Christianity to common life. But it is 
of set purpose that a separate chapter is devoted to 
the topic indicated, for the simple reason that, in 
practice, religion and thinking are often kept apart. 
Instincts, emotions, habits, friendships, circum¬ 
stances—all these are frequent factors in deter¬ 
mining the nature of a man’s religion. But the 
factor of sheer, hard thinking is not commonly 
allowed the place which it ought to have. And, 
unless it is given that place, “ every-day religion ” 
is liable to be deflected from its sane and Christian 
course by the side-winds of folly, prejudice and 
delusion. 

There are various causes at work to foster this 
severance between a man’s spiritual life and his 
mental activities. For instance, there still exist 
religious people who, in religion, belittle and 
distrust intellectual processes; they imagine an 
antithesis between “ faith ” and reason, and think 
*95 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


it a “ holy ” thing to exalt the former at the expense 
of the latter. They seem to forget that God made 
the mind, and that “ faith ” involves a movement 
of the whole personality, with will, feelings and 
intellect blending in one personal process. Then, 
again, there are certain people who engage in 
ordinary affairs with intelligence and even ability, 
but who never think of applying their mind to 
their religion as they do to their business. They 
would probably accept the name Christian, but it 
does not seem to occur to them to take the trouble 
to understand their religion in the sort of way in 
which they seek to understand the running of a 
business, the working of a motor-car or the art of 
golf. Perhaps the real root of the trouble is the 
ordinary Britisher’s intense dislike of thinking. We 
take most things, including religion, as a matter of 
course. A comment in a recent novel might be 
appropriately addressed to any Englishman : “ It 
looks to me as if you take your morality, like your 
dinner, as a matter of course; it’s always there; 
you don’t have to bother after it; you don’t really 
know how it comes, or what it is worth.” 1 We 
are not, as a nation, devoid of practical capacity, 
and we have a great knack of finding practical 
solutions for pressing problems; but the idea of 
probing through the familiar into the immensities 
behind is one that fills most of us, especially in 
religious things, with distaste and dismay. 

Yet the most simple-minded Christian will find 
it well to do some thinking in his religion. He will 
never, otherwise, see half its glories or appreciate 
1 The Good Comrade , by Una L. Silberrad. 

196 


CHRISTIANITY AND THOUGHT 


the secrets of its strength. He will remain blind 
to the great fact that Christianity is ultimately 
rational . Not rational in the lower sense of being 
capable of material proof; but rational in the far 
greater sense of revealing a profound harmony with 
man’s deepest thinking and highest aspirations . 1 
Christians have good ground for claiming that the 
religion of Jesus Christ “ makes sense ” of God and 
the universe in a way that rationalism and other 
non-Christian schemes of thought completely fail 
to do . 2 Indeed one of the most significant signs 
of our times is the apparently complete discrediting 
of rationalism. It still provides tags for Hyde 
Park orators, but it carries less and less conviction 
with those, students and others, who have oppor¬ 
tunity to think and read. It deserves the gibe of a 
prominent thinker of to-day, that “ it is hardly 
scientific to lecture on the corpse of religion, when 
all the while religion is alive and laughing at you.” 

1 Cf. a statement made in the Introduction to The Sprit (edited 
by B. H. Streeter), p. x : “ The relation of religion and the creative 
thought of the day is quite different now from what it was fifty, 
or even fifteen, years ago. On the one side, the spirit of scientific 
inquiry has—it must be confessed, only after a hard struggle— 
firmly established itself in Christian Theology; on the other, the 
leaders of the world’s thought have discovered that no philosophy 
can hold water which has not sympathetically studied, and in its 
system found a place for, the historical and psychological phenomena 
in which religion has found expression. After centuries of bickering, 
Religion and Science at last have shaken hands—and if only they 
would go a step farther and become fast friends, they could, by 
pooling their resources, regenerate the world.” 

2 The reader will find an admirable and suggestive discussion 
of Christianity and reason in D. S. Cairns’s book, The Reasonableness 
of the Christian Faith (Hodder & Stoughton, 5/.). 

197 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


II 

Christian “ belief ” is not to be thought of for 
a moment as a comfortable settling down in a 
mental armchair. It is, rather, a voyage of dis¬ 
covery, an adventure, a long and arduous quest. 
As Donald Hankey once said, “ True religion is 
betting your life there is a God.” And the object 
of this quest is reality : reality which shows itself 
as truth, as goodness, as beauty; reality which is, 
ultimately, God Himself. Does this mean that 
every Christian must be a theologian and a philo¬ 
sopher ? Not at all. But it does mean that 
every Christian can, and should, cultivate a certain 
attitude of mind. He should realize, for instance, 
that an honest and even successful attempt to do 
right does not exhaust the meaning of Christianity; 
that Truth and Beauty, as well as Goodness, have 
their source in God. He should see that he has a 
moral duty of testing what he is asked to believe; 
for “ the mass of men hold a great many opinions to 
which they have no right, because they are not the 
result of any search for truth.” He should under¬ 
stand that the fact of Christ, and his own relation¬ 
ship to God in Christ, are not things that can be 
privately appropriated, neatly classified and defined, 
and carefully communicated to others who can 
learn to repeat his formulae; he must see that these 
things touch, at a hundred points, the very mys¬ 
teries of the universe, and are as untamed as the 
free winds of God that blow as they list over the 
198 


CHRISTIANITY AND THOUGHT 


face of the earth. And he can hardly fail to note 
that Jesus would never force belief, or allow men 
to mistake formulae for faith; rather He left them 
free, nay He set them free, to pursue truth wherever 
it might lead. For these reasons, the Christian, 
however loyal to his creed, will never think that he 
can hold truth, least of all any monopoly of truth, 
in the hollow of his hand. He will be prepared, if 
and when necessary, for intellectual suspense, and 
will patiently await the slow dawning of the true 
answer to some of his deepest questions. And he 
will be careful never to shutter the windows of his 
mind, nor to lose a sense of wonder. Not for him 
that deadening, damning ignorance which thinks 
to contain the wide sea in its child’s pail; not that, 
but awe, and reverence, and wondering thankfulness 
for the glories of God in earth and sky and human 
life, and the yet greater glories that no eye hath 
seen nor mind imagined. 

( u My heart leaps up when I behold 
A rainbow in the sky: 

So was it when my life began ; 

So is it now I am a man ; 

So be it when I shall grow old, > 

Or let me die ! ” 1 ' 

And this adventure after truth is no forlorn 
hope; it is no rudderless drifting over uncharted 
seas. It is a real search after something that may 
be found, a reaching up to find and seize a Hand 
already stretched out. Otherwise this life of ours 
were indeed a meaningless mockery: 

1 William Wordsworth. 

199 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


“. . . . a tale 

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 

Signifying nothing.” 

The Christian life is always a wonderful blend of 
struggle and achievement. So the Christian search 
for truth is not all seeking and no finding, all travel¬ 
ling and no arriving. As soon as you embark on 
that great adventure you stumble upon this paradox, 
that as you grasp more of Christ Himself, all the 
horizons of your thinking lift and stretch. And 
there dawns upon you some glimmering of truth’s 
many-sidedness. There would be less of paralyzing 
division in the Church to-day if Christians could 
see that, for them, there are at the very least three 
facets to truth, three elements in the Church’s 
spiritual experience. There is the mystical or 
“ Evangelical ” element, with its emphasis on the 
soul’s immediate experience of the living God. 
There is the institutional or “ Catholic,” em¬ 
phasizing both the continuity and the universal 
order of the Church’s life and of the Christian 
tradition. And there is the intellectual or 
“ Liberal,” with its fear of formulae, its passion 
for truth, and its jealousy for freedom to test and 
prove and probe and investigate. These necessary 
differences of emphasis lead to suspicion and division 
only as and when the common Christian fails to 
think and suffers his own petty prejudices to blind 
his eyes to the greatness of God’s truth. 


200 


CHRISTIANITY AND THOUGHT 


III 

In John Masefield’s striking poem, The Ever¬ 
lasting Mercy , the disreputable and drunken poacher 
Saul Kane is transformed into a good man and 
true; and he is himself, as he thinks behind his 
plough, quite certain that Jesus Christ is responsible 
for the change in him. 

“ Up the slow slope a team came bowing, 

Old Callow at his autumn ploughing, 

Old Callow, stooped above the hales, 

Ploughing the stubble into wales; 

His grave eyes looking straight ahead, 

Shearing a long straight furrow red; 

His plough-foot high to give it earth 
To bring new food for men to birth. 

O wet red swathe of earth laid bare, 

O truth, O strength, O gleaming share, 

O patient eyes that watch the goal, 

O ploughman of the sinner’s soul, 

O Jesus, drive the coulter deep 
To plough my living man from sleep. 

I kneeled there in the muddy fallow, 

I knew that Christ was there with Callow, 

That Christ was standing there with me, 

That Christ had taught me what to be, 

That I should plough, and as I ploughed 
My Saviour Christ would sing aloud, 

And as I drove the clods apart 
Christ would be ploughing in my heart, 

Through rest-harrow and bitter roots, 

Through all my bad life’s rotten fruits.” 

A great many other people have had an experience 
similar to this, and entertain a like conviction as 

201 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


to its cause That this kind of experience is real 
—that is, that “ something happens ” to a man’s 
springs of action and so to his moral conduct—is 
now generally admitted; it is recognized as coming 
within the sphere of facts and phenomena which it 
is the business of psychology to investigate. 1 The 
description and interpretation of such experience, 
and the relation of it to Christian belief, is and 
must always be the chief preoccupation of Christian 
thinking; it is the main undertaking of historic 
and modern theology. And (so this chapter claims) 
every individual Christian must use the mind he 
has, to reflect upon and understand the nature of 
his Christian experience. 

It would obviate much difficulty and mis¬ 
apprehension, both within and without the Church, 
if it was more clearly understood that “ dogma ” 
—that bugbear of the “ plain man ”—simply 
represents an attempt to describe and formulate 
spiritual experience. Man, as a rational being, has 
to make that attempt, he cannot do otherwise; as 
Plato first insisted, “ the unexamined life is not 
livable for a human being.” Religious dogma is 
not an invention of theologians, it is a necessity 
of human nature. Let me illustrate what I mean. 
Imagine a Christian disciple somewhere about the 
year a.d. 35, one who had been drawn to Jesus of 
Nazareth in the days of His flesh, and had since 
shared the experiences of the little Christian com¬ 
munity in those first thrilling years. Perhaps, with 
urgent tasks to perform and dangers to face, there 

1 William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience is a notable 
example of such investigation. 


202 


CHRISTIANITY AND THOUGHT 

had not yet been much opportunity to reflect; 
but at last there comes a day when he sits down to 
try and think out what it all means; he feels the 
impulse to sift his impressions and sort his ex¬ 
periences, to clear his mind and shape conclusions. 
What does he find to be the main content of his 
religious experience ? He has always believed in 
God, the creator and sustainer of the universe; 
since he met Jesus he has dared to think of God 
and treat God as “ Father.” With regard to Jesus 
Himself, as he recalls the characteristics of that 
amazing personality, as he passes in review that life 
and that unforgettable death, he can only sum it up 
by saying to himself, “ God must be like that ”; 
in Him, Jesus, God is surely showing what He 
Himself is. Moreover, since those days ended, 
Jesus has seemed more alive than ever, and the 
thought of Him has become inextricably interwoven 
with all thought of God Himself. But this is not 
all. Ever since Jesus ceased to be physically present 
with them, this first-century Christian has been 
conscious, as he and his friends laboured for the 
new Kingdom, of a new energy and buoyancy and 
driving power, new hopes and impulses, indeed a 
new character and new self; he attempts and does 
things now which formerly would have seemed 
outrageously impossible; it is almost as if Jesus, as 
if God , had put into him something of His own life 
and spirit. . . . And what is he to make of it all ? 
Who and what is this God who seems to be above 
and in the world, and in Jesus, and in his own 
heart ? Must there not be in God some wonderful, 
indefinable three-foldness of personality and of 
203 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


function ? And his experiences and those of his 
friends—their emergence from the old, engulfing 
life of evil, the astounding change that had come 
upon them all, the new life, the new brotherly 
fellowship, the new hopes for the whole world, the 
new sense of spiritual realities transcending time 
and space—can it be that all these things fit in 
together as coherent parts of a planned and ordered 
whole, expressing a law and a purpose that have 
their springs in eternity ? For these great things 
the effort had to be made to find words, not indeed 
to contain them, but at least to characterize them; 
and so the Church embarks on its task of evolving 
language to fit its experience, and the standard 
words and categories emerge—Trinity, incarnation, 
atonement, Holy Ghost, sin, redemption, regenera¬ 
tion, Holy Catholic Church, communion of saints, 
resurrection, judgment, life everlasting. “ Dogma,” 
therefore, originally and properly, is no mere 
theorizing, or juggling with words, or devising of 
tests and barriers; it is a courageous and vital 
attempt to interpret and communicate tremendous 
experiences. 


IV 

This chapter, I may point out, is not written for 
the theologian but for “ the man in the pew,” or 
the man who has not even reached a pew at all 
but stands outside, not unsympathetic, but won¬ 
dering what it is all about. To assist him, if I 
may, in any attempt to relate dogma to “ every¬ 
day religion,” I would like to offer one or two 
204 


CHRISTIANITY AND THOUGHT 


comments on what has been said above of the 
Christian necessity to elucidate and transcribe 
spiritual experience. In the first place, there is 
always a certain dangerous tendency, in these 
matters, to put the cart before the horse. The 
man inside the Church slips into thinking that the 
all-important matter is to accept the dogma, 
however little of the reality behind the dogma is 
actually passing into his experience. And the man 
outside assails the doctrine as stupid or mediaeval 
or impossible, without making any personal attempt 
to explore what lies beneath it. Christianity is 
primarily a life, not a system of belief, and life 
always precedes analysis ; “ anyone who is willing to 
do God’s will,” said Christ, “ shall know of the 
teaching, whether it be of God.” 1 Those words of 
Christ warn and judge all those who, in religion, 
accept dogmas with a minimum of personal verifi¬ 
cation, who easily, cheaply, inertly profess beliefs 
while taking very little pains to act on them. 

Then, again, there is always a tendency for 
transcribed experience gradually to harden into 
static, rigid, authoritative formulas which, in the 
end, only too easily repress the life they are designed 
to explain and stimulate. As we have seen, formulae 
there must be, if men are to define and explain 
anything; but that is no reason why, in religion, 
they should so often become contrivances to avoid 
thinking, beds to rest on, shelters to hide in, plat¬ 
forms to shout from, battlements to guard, barriers 
to exclude. Of creeds and the Churches something 
is said elsewhere. 2 Suffice it to say here that every 
1 St. John vii. 17. 2 See Chapter XIII. 


205 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


man who wants reality in religion must pursue it 
through and behind the interpretations and descrip¬ 
tions, official or otherwise, in which it may be 
offered to him. No one in his senses will under¬ 
value the accumulated wisdom of the centuries; 
to disregard the evidence and explanations of 
preceding generations, some of them with special 
qualifications for the task, would be gratuitously 
foolish. Yet there is a real sense in which even 
the unlearned and untutored man must himself go 
back again to the very source—and the recovery by 
historical criticism of the real New Testament and 
the historic Jesus has made such a return more 
feasible for us to-day than for any generation since 
the first. After all, explanations do not always 
explain, and good things easily have the bloom 
rubbed off when passed too carelessly from hand 
to hand. There is a passage in one of W. J. Locke’s 
books which, with a reductio ad absurdum , mocks at 
the weakness of third-hand religion. One of the 
characters seeks to explain the odd phenomenon of 
a Frenchwoman who was very “ religious ” but not 
very Christian : “ ‘ Mon ami,’ said Bigourdin, c the 
Bible taught the Church the beautiful history of 
Jesus Christ. The Church told a Bishop. The 
Bishop told a priest. The priest told the wife of 
the sub-prefect. The wife of the sub-prefect told 
the wife of the mayor. The wife of the mayor 
told the elderly unmarried sister of the corn- 
chandler, and the unmarried sister of the corn- 
chandler told Clothilde. And that’s all that 
Clothilde knows about Christianity.’ ” 

It is worth any effort, any pain, any seeming loss, 
206 


CHRISTIANITY AND THOUGHT 


to disentangle the essential from the non-essential, 
to cut clean through the accretions of generations 
and find again Him who is Himself the Way, the 
Truth, and the Life. The truth-seeker will gain 
on the exchange. 

“ Let men see 
Breathe from me 
Zeal for truth, unafraid 
Of the price to be paid;— 

Words that once could make Him clear, 

Forms that once could bring Him near, 

Things I loved wrenched clean away, 

Half a cherished creed to pay! 

Fear not, He is Truth, and I, 

If I saw Him through a lie, 

Shall not lose Him when I find 
I must leave the lie behind.” 1 

Nor need such a truth-seeker fear for truth. 
Truth is well able to defend itself, and is only 
embarrassed when its would-be defenders try to 
interpose with the violent weapons of authority. 


V 

It is clear enough that no amount of thinking 
will enable any one mind to grasp all truth in its 
many aspects and ramifications. All that is argued 
here is that the “ plain Christian ” could and should 
do sufficient thinking to enable him to realize 
something of the greatness of truth, to relate those 
parts of truth which come, at any rate partially, 
within his own apprehension to those which lie 
1 Janet Begbie, Morning Mist . 

207 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


beyond it, and to make some sense of bis own 
spiritual experiences. It is about the last of these 
thinking functions that I want to say something 
as this chapter closes. 

There is a saying of Thomas Traherne’s, that 
“ to think well is to serve God in the interior court.” 
The saying would serve as a good motto for the 
Christian’s prayer life. The quality and effective¬ 
ness of “ every-day religion ” depend entirely on 
the vision, the inspiration, the actual touch with 
God which lies behind it; and in that life with 
God the mind must play its proper part. Take the 
all-important question, for prayer, of the con¬ 
ception of God in the mind of him who is praying. 
Of necessity allowance must be made for a certain 
margin of error, where blind and sinful men seek 
to know the holy and infinite God. But it is for 
us to reduce that margin to the smallest possible 
dimensions by blending with our power of intuitive, 
spiritual apprehension all the powers of ordinary 
hard thinking we possess. If this is not done, then 
it is more than possible that prayer may be addressed 
to a God who simply is not there. An unintelligent 
faith opens the door to credulity and superstition. 
“ Where God is not, there are ghosts.” “ Take 
heed,” urges Prof. Royce, “ lest your object of 
worship be only your own little pet infinite, that 
is sublime to you mainly because it is yours.” The 
“ Christian ” who addresses his prayer to a God 
thought of as despotic, or vengeful, or capricious, 
or weakly good-natured, or anything other than the 
God of Jesus Christ, misses the mark just as badly 
as the heathen with his incantations or the Buddhist 
208 


CHRISTIANITY AND THOUGHT 

with his prayer-wheel. The conception of God 
that lies beneath your praying is of crucial im¬ 
portance. You cannot pray effectively unless you 
are sure of God’s character. But what God is and 
wills and plans, what He is doing and wants us to 
do, how through prayer we may co-operate with 
Him—these are things that demand all the thought 
of which our minds are capable, and thought that 
concentrates on the picture of God we see in Christ. 
This does not mean the whittling down of prayer 
into a mere intellectual process. Nor does it 
exclude or belittle those moments of insight, those 
flashes of inspiration, those mountain tops of open 
vision, which come from time to time to every soul 
that is in tune with Him. These flights of the 
spirit will become more, not less possible, if behind 
them is the permanent background of a spiritual 
life that is mentally disciplined. This kind of hard 
thinking, says the writer of a recent very valuable 
book , 1 “ is the outcome of a settled resolution to 
come to grips with the great spiritual facts, by 
pondering them patiently, and painstakingly steep¬ 
ing the mind in them, until it is as completely 
naturalized in their lofty atmosphere as it is in the 
air of the market-place. It may well humiliate us 
to reflect how nimbly, and with what instinctive 
precision, our minds move among the ordinary 
actualities of our life in the world, how sensitive 
they are to every change and how flexible in applying 
themselves to every new situation, and then to 
realize how awkward, blunt-edged, and unadaptable 
these same minds are when we try to apply them 
1 Creative Prayer , by E. Herman. Cf. p. 78. 

209 


P 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


to spiritual reality. There is no shirking the fact 
that it takes a strict and continuous discipline 
before the mind becomes tempered to the things 
of God, sensitive to the tides of grace, and flexible 
in the hands of the Spirit.” 


210 


CHAPTER XII 

THE ROOT OF THE MATTER 


** Behold, I stand at the door, and knock : if any man hear My 
voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with 
him, and he with Me .”—Revelation iii. 20. 

Jesus said : " Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant 
knoweth not what his lord doeth : but I have called you friends.”— 
St. John xv. 15. 

*' My soul, be thou silent unto God; for my expectation is from 
Him .”—Psalm lxii. 5 (R.V. marg.). 

“ By all means use sometimes to be alone. 

Salute thyself: see what thy soul doth wear. 

Dare to look in thy chest; for ’tis thine own : 

And tumble up and down what thou find’st there. 

Who cannot rest till he good fellows finde. 

He breaks up house, turns out of doors his minde.” 

George Herbert. 


" Lord Jesus, who would think that I am Thine ? 

Ah ! who would think, 

Who sees me ready to turn back or sink, 

That Thou art mine? 

I cannot hold Thee fast though Thou art mine : 

Hold Thou me fast. 

So earth shall know at last and heaven at last 
That I am Thine.” 

Christina Rossetti. 

" There is a secret place of rest 
God’s saints alone may know; 

Thou shalt not find it east nor west, 

Though seeking to and fro. 

A cell where Jesus is the door, 

His love the only key : 

Who enter will go out no more. 

But there with Jesus be.” 

From The Inner Life. 


CHAPTER XII 


THE ROOT OF THE MATTER 

Every reformer has a programme; and most of 
his energies are spent in the effort to induce people 
to attend to it and to give it a trial. And cynics 
find an easy target in the accumulated heap of 
programmes, good, bad and indifferent, which, 
from time to time, have been pressed upon humanity 
but which humanity could not be induced to adopt. 
Jesus was—is—a reformer. He also has a pro¬ 
gramme. His programme fares better than other 
programmes; indeed, it is the only programme of 
the kind which appears likely to find general accept¬ 
ance and ultimate realization. What is the reason 
for this ? The reason is the measure of His difference 
from other reformers. Unlike them, He comes to 
men with both a programme and the key to its 
accomplishment. He not only tells men what to 
do; but, what is far more difficult, He tells them 
how to do it. His reform-programme is sweeping 
enough; but He does not omit the essential pre¬ 
liminary of individual regeneration. All through 
this book we have glanced, from time to time, at 
this aspect of His unique power with men. In the 
various regions of human life that have been 
examined we have always found ourselves thrust 
213 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


back on the conclusion that the values and standards 
which we see to be right and desirable are unattain¬ 
able save by His methods. In this chapter I pro¬ 
pose to examine more closely what this method, this 
secret, really is; for unless we can get fairly hold 
of it, the “ every-day religion ” of our ideal will 
slip away out of reach. 


I 

The method referred to depends, as we have seen 
before, on a real personal contact between us human 
beings and God Himself. Man’s moral duty, “ Thou 
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” is based on, 
and complementary to, something more funda¬ 
mental still: “ Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart and all thy strength.” The secret 
of this relationship with God is, in essence, simple; 
that is to say, it is not an esoteric mystery reserved 
for the initiated few, nor is it so intellectually com¬ 
plex as to be available only for the intelligentsia of 
mankind. Nevertheless it is missed by multitudes; 
and it constantly eludes the grasp of many who wish 
to be, and in a certain sense are, religious. Why is 
this ? The fact surely is that most of us do not 
really want goodness or God; or at least our desire 
for Him is so half-hearted as to be ineffective. And, 
what is even more serious, even though we see that 
goodness is beautiful and desirable, that it would 
make the world a changed world, yet incontinently, 
perversely, not once nor twice but again and again, 
we let it go and choose its opposite. This hideous 
preference for evil, this ghastly wilful flaw in the 
214 


THE ROOT OF THE MATTER 


mind of man, begetting the misery, the disease, the 
hate, the chaos that pour like a flood over God’s 
world—for this thing Jesus, and the men of God 
before Him and since, have a name : they call it 
sin. It is well to look at that word, not dismissing 
it as part of the preacher’s stock-in-trade. “ Crime ” 
has a legal savour, and we can leave it to juries and 
judges; we are concerned with something even 
deeper and more serious than injury to society. 
By calling it “ sin ” Jesus would have us face the 
judge and jury in our own hearts; He would bid us 
see what our blind selfishness (for that is sin’s essence) 
means to God. Making all possible allowance for 
heredity, for environment, for every extraneous 
circumstance, we must perforce in honesty admit 
that “ sin ” is our own fault; that our hands have 
built this prison-house in which we live. It is told 
of a famous smith of mediaeval times,^ that having 
been taken prisoner and put in a dungeon, he con¬ 
ceived the idea of escaping, and began to examine 
the chain that bound him, in the hopes of discovering 
some flaw which might make it easier to be broken. 
His hope was vain, for he found from marks upon 
it that it was one of his own workmanship, and it 
had always been his boast that none could ever break 
a chain which he had forged. And now it was his 
own chain that bound him. j Are we not in a like 
case ? And is there any way out from this impasse P 
There is a way out. And at the entrance to that 
way there stands a cross, and on the cross hangs the 
Son of God Himself. ... In speaking of this 
matter I do not propose to use the language of 
rhetoric (as if words could ever paint so great a 
215 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 

thing), nor the language of theology—the pedantries 
of theologians, and the arid controversies of little 
men, only obscure the inexpressible beauty and the 
unmistakable significance of that Death on Calvary. 
Speaking as a plain Christian, for whom there would 
be no Christianity without that cross and its assur¬ 
ance of forgiveness, I would try and set down in 
ordinary language something of what it means. 
I am quite sure, to begin with, as Christians from 
the first have been sure, that in all this “ God was in 
Christ 99 ; that that death, due, as to immediate caus¬ 
ation, to the enmity of the Jews and the judgment 
of Pontius Pilate, was at the same time serving the 
eternal purposes of God Himself; there and then was 
the classic instance of the shaping of good out of the 
raw material of evil. And if God was Himself “ in 99 
that happening (I do not attempt to argue this : 
I am simply expressing universal Christian conviction 
and experience), then certain inferences are legiti¬ 
mate, indeed inevitable. For one thing I see there 
some hint of what sin must mean to God. If “ God 
was in Christ” on Calvary, then the wrong-doing that 
set up that Cross, and all the wrong-doing of human¬ 
ity before and since, are deep and terrible wounds in 
the heart of eternal Love. Yet the Cross is far 
more than a revelation of a passive, suffering God. 
The whole earthly life of Jesus, culminating in that 
climax of self-giving, reveals God in action, God 
taking the initiative to bring men back into fellowship 
with Himself. “ He first loved us ”... “ God 
proves His love for us by this, that Christ died for 
us while we were still sinners.” There, demonstrated 
on this earth, set forth in a human life on the plane 
216 


THE ROOT OF THE MATTER 


of history so that all can see and understand, is Divine 
Love, reaching down to estranged humanity to bless 
and heal and forgive and restore. There is the amaz¬ 
ing thing of God saying to men, in effect, that He 
wants them; that He on His side can never rest 
content while His fellowship with them is broken; 
that He is prepared to go all conceivable lengths to 
repair that broken fellowship. 

Is not this the answer to our fundamental difficulty 
described above ? Once a man sees that his sin has 
hurt God and that, nevertheless, God still wants 
him, then the whole situation is changed. And it 
is precisely this tremendous change which is affected 
when a man comes up against the Cross of Christ 
with his eyes open. As the meaning of that death 
dawns on my dull mind, then there is quickened in 
me a new distaste for sin, a new desire for goodness, 
a new longing to respond to that seeking Love and 
seize that stretched-out Hand. Incredible as it 
may seem, He still, despite all the past, believes in 
me, sees possibilities in me, and will lift me up to 
try again. 


“ Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, 
Guilty of dust and sin. 

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack 
From my first entrance in, 

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning 
If I lacked anything. 

‘ A Guest/ I answered, 4 worthy to be here.’ 

Love said : 4 You shall be he.’ 

* I, the unkind, ungrateful ? Ah, my dear, 

I cannot look on Thee.’ 

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, 

4 Who made the eyes, but I ? * 

217 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


4 Truth, Lord, but I have marred them; let my shame 
Go where it doth deserve/ 

4 And know you not,’ saith Love, * who bore the blame ? 9 

4 My dear, then I will serve/ 

4 You must sit down,’ says Love, 4 and taste My meat/ 

So I did sit and eat/’ 1 

II 

If we had not heard all this before we should say 
it was too good to be true. But any man who 
refuses to let himself be deterred, either by famili¬ 
arity or by incredulity, and is willing to stoop low 
enough to enter this portal, does in fact find himself 
walking in the Way of Power. Power to be his true 
self, power to rise to the highest possibilities of his 
better nature, power to live by the standard of Christ 
in the common circumstances of daily life—that is, 
beyond any gainsaying, given to those who, rescued, 
healed, restored, forgiven, abide continually in the 
friendship of the living God. No Christian who 
is worthy of the name will ever cut down his ideal 
to the measure of his power : he will increase his 
power to match his ideal. It is not easy, in a page 
or two, to describe this hidden dynamic which can 
and does make a selfish man unselfish. The man 
really comes to live in a new moral climate. As 
Dr. Glover describes it, “ Jesus changes the spiritual 
temperature and the parasite sin dies, and the natural 
man revives and grows into what God meant. . . . 
It is the beautiful instincts, the powers of mind and 
character that make, we feel, the true man. What 
Jesus does is to give them the chance to grow.” 2 

1 George Herbert. 2 Jesus in the Experience of Men , p. 30. 

218 


THE ROOT OF THE MATTER 


And this “ climate ” is as favourable to faith as it is 
fatal to sin. Faith, in Jesus’s meaning of the word, 
is no religious technicality; it stands rather for an 
unshakable conviction that God is real, near, avail¬ 
able, and an unhesitating readiness to stake all on 
that conviction. Those men who, in the first 
century and since, have learnt their faith from Jesus, 
have found in their own experience that God in 
Christ is the dominating factor in every situation, 
that there does actually seem to flow into their 
personality from Him something of His very self, 
something which transforms character and fashions 
circumstances with a decisiveness and a completeness 
that have no parallel elsewhere. All the early 
Christian documents are full of this experience, and 
strain their available language in the effort to 
describe it . 1 

The new psychology has done much of late to 
reveal and elicit the latent possibilities of average 
human nature. For nineteen centuries Christianity 
has been effecting just such moral transformations, 
though without psychological definitions and 
explanations. When a Christian hears the living 
Christ say to him “ You can,” he says to himself 
“ I can ”; and in the strength of that confidence 
the words “ possible ” and “ impossible ” alter their 
meanings. “ In Him who strengthens me I am able 
for anything; ” 2 “ It is no weak Christ we have to 
do with, but a Christ of power.” 3 This exuberance 


1 See such passages as St. John v. 24, Acts xx. 32, Rom. viii., 

2 Cor. v. 17 f. 

2 Phil. iv. 13 (Moffatt). 3 2 Cor. xiii. 3. 


219 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


of spiritual life, this clean break with old sins, this 
flow of moral power, is, however amazing it may seem, 
God’s free gift to the ordinary man ; to regard it as 
an attainment of the religiously elect is to misunder¬ 
stand it altogether. It is for all; and it is an 
experience so great that it can only be described as 
a passing from death to life—“ there is a new 
creation whenever a man becomes united to 
Christ.” 1 St. Paul quite truly but paradoxically 
“ has to keep telling his converts to remember that 
they are dead and buried, and reminds them how 
indecent it is for a man to forget his own funeral 
once it has taken place. If a Christian meets his 
old self emerging in some evil thought—he ought to 
say to it, 4 What are you doing here ? When Christ 
found me we buried you . 9 . . . The choice for 
everyone who finds Christ and is found by Him is 
not a choice between different grades of respecta¬ 
bility, but between living in the world of 6 self ’ and 
living in the Kingdom of Grace.” 2 

This experience of forgiveness, of vitalizing, 
energizing power, while it varies in intensity, and for 
different people takes different forms, produces in 
all the same solid result, namely, that of a character 
which grows to resemble the character of Christ. 
The building of such a character, with stones from 
such a quarry, is not selfishness disguised as religion; 
it is, as we have seen before , 3 the chief service we 
may render to our fellows, the most effective contri- 

1 2 Cor. v. 17. 

2 W. R. Maltby on “ The Power of God in Human Life,” in 
Christ and Human Need (Student Movement, y. 6 d.). 

2 Cf. Chapter IV. 


220 


THE ROOT OF THE MATTER 

bution we may make to the needs of our generation. 
These astounding gifts of His, poured out with 
transforming effect, are not for a man’s private 
edification; any such receiving of God’s love must 
kindle a response to His purposes. “ God is not a 
spiritual troubadour, wooing the hearts of men and 
women to no purpose; God goes through the world 
like drums and fifes and flags, calling for recruits 
along the street.” 1 When God is the dominating 
factor in a man’s relationships with other men, 
then, through a myriad different channels, the 
Divine in him will spontaneously, quietly, inevitably 
touch and help and influence them. The whole 
process is gloriously natural and normal. It is 
worlds removed from priggishness, or a blatant and 
repellant religiosity. There is nothing forced or 
mechanical or artificial about the life with Christ, 
and the service of men for Christ’s sake. Character 
by contagion is a law no less infallible than that of 
gravitation. So the first disciples found, when they 
kept company with Him among the hills of Galilee, 
experiencing, in that companionship, what Harnack 
has called “ infinite love in ordinary intercourse.” 
And so it invariably happens. When a man 
deliberately makes room in heart and life for the 
living Jesus Christ, then, as night follows day, sorrow 
loses its sting, sin is cheated of its power, defeat is 
swallowed up in victory, and the whole of life— 
its work, its beauty, its purpose, its friendships— 
takes on a radiance which transfigures everything. 
“ Thereafter one goes about the world like one who 
was lonely and has found a lover, like one who was 
i H. G. Wells. 


221 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


perplexed and has found a solution.” If we spend 
time in the company of Christ, we simply cannot 
help becoming better men and women; and if 
we are better men and women, that fact will inevi¬ 
tably operate for good in the lives of those with whom 
we come into daily contact/ Some forty years ago 
in the South Pacific there fvas a missionary bishop 
named John Selwyn, who ill his university days had 
proved himself the possessor of great physical 
strength. He had rowed in the Cambridge boat. 
In the course of his work as Bishop of Melanesia 
he had one day to speak grave words of warning and 
rebuke to a man who was being prepared for baptism. 
The man, removed from savagery only by a genera¬ 
tion or two, lost his temper and struck the bishop a 
violent blow in the face with his clenched fist. All 
the bishop did in return was to fold his arms and look 
at the man, who fled from his presence into the 
jungle, terrified and ashamed. It was in the bishop’s 
power to strike him down, but instead he calmly 
waited to receive another blow. Years afterwards, 
when the bishop had left Melanesia crippled with ill¬ 
ness, and was now Master of a College at Cambridge, 
the man who had assaulted him came to a missionary 
and begged to be baptized. He was examined, and 
his penitence was proved to be genuine. He had 
not long to live, and his baptism could not be delayed. 
Asked what name he would like to take, he replied : 
“ Call me John Selwyn, foait was he who taught me 
what Jesus Christ is like.” ! 


222 


THE ROOT OF THE MATTER 


III 

From all this there is an obvious inference. It 
is, that for anyone who wants to make the best of 
his life it is infinitely worth while—nay, indeed 
absolutely essential—to spend some time every day 
in God’s company. It is, indeed, “ a great art to 
commune with God ” ; but the art may be learnt— 
must be learnt, if we are to make a success of “ every¬ 
day religion.” The mode, and place, and hour of 
entering His Presence may vary indefinitely; He is 
to be found whenever and wherever men seek Him 
—in the sacred mysteries of the Holy Communion, 
in the closed room, in the peaceful garden, in the 
fields or the woods or on the hillside. The essential 
conditions of uninterrupted intercourse are time and 
quiet. “ Hurry is the death of prayer.” “ The 
spiritual realities do not shriek and shout, and it 
still remains true that Jesus comes, ‘ the doors being 
shut.’ ” No rules can be laid down, but probably 
for most people these conditions of time and quiet are 
best secured in the early morning. Many of the 
finest Christians have learned that they could not 
manage without the “ morning watch,” and thought 
it worth while to make any sacrifice to get it. Charles 
Simeon, one of the leaders of the Evangelical revival, 
from 1782 to 1836 Vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge, 
found it hard to get up in the morning to say his 
prayers. He had rooms in King’s College, of which 
College he was a Fellow; and he determined one 
day that if he failed to rise at the hour he set him¬ 
self, he would give half-a-crown to his bedmaker. 
Next morning, in bed, found him arguing with 
223 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


himself that his bedmaker needed the half-crown 
much more than he did, and so his prayer appoint¬ 
ment was missed. Thereupon he resolved that on 
the next failure, instead of giving half-a-crown to 
his bedmaker, he would throw a guinea into 
the Cam, flowing by a hundred yards from his 
rooms. He did miss again; and promptly walked 
down to the bridge and threw the coin into the 
river, where no doubt it remains to this day. 1 I am 
tempted to add another story of another Cambridge 
man, Douglas Thornton, of Marlborough and 
Trinity, who subsequently gave his life to the Cause 
in Egypt. I remember as a boy being taken to 
Douglas Thornton’s rooms in Trinity by my brother, 
who was Thornton’s contemporary. Both belonged 
to a group of keen Christian men, all of them ob¬ 
servers of the “ morning watch.” Thornton, with 
characteristic enthusiasm, made himself get up every 
morning at some incredibly early hour. He found 
the mere noise of an alarum clock quite insufficient 
to get him out of bed; so, being of a mechanical 
turn of mind, he devised a most ingenious con¬ 
trivance of upright posts at the ends of his bed, with 
cords and pulleys attached to the bedclothes and 
connected with the alarum clock; the effect of which 
was, at the appointed hour, to lift the bedclothes 
clean off him as he lay in bed ! He knew, as other 
wise men know, that it is worth while employing 
any dodge, however homely, which will help you to 
say your prayers. There is no other way in which to 
become and to continue spiritually fit. “ Would 
to God,” once cried Samuel Rutherford, “ that all 

1 The story is told in Bishop Mode’s Life of Charles Simeon. 

224 


THE ROOT OF THE MATTER 


cold-blooded, faint-hearted soldiers of Christ would 
look again to Jesus and to His Love ; and when they 
look, I would have them to look again, and again, 
and fill themselves with beholding Christ’s beauty.” 

“ Give Him thy first thoughts; 

So shalt thou keep 
Him company all day. 

And in Him sleep.” 

Those who thus seek and find God know that the 
relationship may be described, without irreverence 
or presumption, as one of intimacy; an intimacy that 
loves to look up at Him or speak with Him at odd 
moments and in all sorts of places—in the street, 
the train, the ’bus, the office, in busy times, or 
among throngs of people. Surely the God of Jesus 
Christ—who runs to meet the prodigal, who loves 
children, who cares for flowers, who is interested in 
men—must mean our relationship with Him to be 
of this kind ? “ Behold, no longer do I call you 

servants, I have called you friends.” How extra¬ 
ordinary that much of “ official ” Christianity should 
have completely missed this thing in God ! “ Many 

of the religious people I know,” says “ Parson John ” 
in a letter to “ Miriam Grey ” in a little pamphlet 
that is worth its weight in gold, 1 “ many of the 
religious people that I know, when they talk of 
religion, have a bedside manner, and walk about in 
felt slippers. And if they speak of God, they always 
tidy themselves first. But you go in and out in all 
the rooms in God’s house as though you were quite 

1 God in Everything (Kelly, “ Manuals of Fellowship,” No. 3, 
4 d. each). 

Q 


225 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


at home. You open the doors without knocking, 
and you hum on the stairs, and it isn’t always hymns 
either. My aunt thinks you are not quite reverent; 
but, then, she can keep felt slippers on her mind 
without any trouble. . . .” And here is a bit 
from “ Miriam Grey’s ” reply : “ Until about three 
years ago I used to think the right thing was to tidy 
up, and be grave and prepared in my mind . . . 
but now it’s so different. What is the difference, 
you say ? Well, I’m not quite sure, but it’s some¬ 
thing like this. All that time the world was really 
a school. And though I called God Father , I really 
thought of Him as a lot of other things first— 
Schoolmaster, King, Lord Almighty, and so on; 
and afterwards, or with an effort, I remembered He 
was Father, though even then He was sometimes a 
long way off. It had never really got down into 
my mind that He was my Father. And now it 
is different. I’m not at school; I’ve come home. 
It is my Father’s house, and it’s awfully jolly to live 
at home with Him there always. So why shouldn’t 
I go in and out freely ? Your daughter said one day 
that Dad’s study had never been shut against her. 
How shouldn’t I or you go into His rooms without 
knocking ? He leaves the doors open on purpose, 
because He’s glad to have us. I’m sorry if your 
aunt’s feelings are shocked; but the fact is that 
God is the only one who never makes me feel shy, or 
afraid of being in the way, or not good enough or 
wise enough or something enough, and I do love it 
so.” 

One matter may be emphasized at this point. In 
this wonderful, happy companionship, especially 
226 


THE ROOT OF THE MATTER 


in the times set apart fot “ praying,” spaces should 
always be kept for silent converse. True prayer is 
not a monologue but a conversation; and it is vital 
that ample opportunity should be given to Him 
to speak to us. It is well to take pains to cultivate 
the listening side of prayer. “ The more earnestly 
you are at work for Jesus,” a wise man once said, 
“ the more you need times when what you are 
trying to do for Him passes totally out of your 
mind, and the only thing worth thinking of is what 
He is doing for you.” 

For everyone, whatever his duties or vocation, it 
remains true that life’s best work is accomplished in 
“ the secret place ” ; there is the source and secret 
of the highest kind of output. The Venerable Bede 
in his History tells the story of a chieftain who, as 
he faced the battle-line of his enemies, saw a com¬ 
pany of monks lifting up their hands in prayer for 
them on a hill a little way off. Directing his soldiers 
towards the monks, he gave the order, “ Kill those 
men first, for they are the most dangerous.” In 
wielding that mighty weapon some are more adept 
than others; but every common Christian can and 
should know something of its use. Our several 
gifts and talents, our tasks and vocations, may vary 
indefinitely, but this one thing all can do : we can 
bring to God a personality to be filled with Himself, 
to be touched, energized, set alight by the flame of 
His Spirit. Gallons of cold water will be poured on 
those spiritual fires to put them out, but they shall 
burn steadily on if they are duly fed, like the flames 
that Christian was shown in Pilgrim's Progress , 
from the secret fount of oil on the farther side. In 
227 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


one of his speeches Marshal Foch has pointed out 
that it was, ultimately, their moral ardour which 
brought victory to the Allies in 1918, as it had done 
a hundred years before to the Prussians in 1814. 
“ Blucher, Zieten and the others,” said he, “ were 
very far from being military geniuses. Their 
intelligence was not of the first order, their intellect 
was limited, but the internal flame which inspired 
them sufficed for all.” To keep that flame alive, 
in the campaign for the Kingdom of God, through 
every circumstance of discouragement, despite all 
opposition within and without—that is the plain 
duty, and the perfectly possible duty, of every servant 
of Christ. And to fight by His side, inspired by 
His strength and courage, is the most satisfying 
thing a man can ever do. 

“ Joy is the wine that God is ever pouring 

Into the hearts of those who strive with Him, 

Light’ning their eyes to vision and adoring, 

Strength’ning their arms to warfare glad and grim. 

So would I live, and not in idle resting, 

Stupid as swine that wallow in the mire, 

Fain would I fight, and be for ever breasting 
Danger and death, for ever under fire. 

Bread of Thy Body give me for my fighting, 

Give me to drink Thy Sacred Blood for wine, 

While there are wrongs that need me for the righting, 

While there is warfare splendid and divine. 

Give me, for light, the sunshine of Thy sorrow, 

Give me, for shelter, shadow of Thy Cross, 

Give me to share the Glory of Thy morrow, 

Gone from my heart the bitterness of loss.” 1 

1 G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, Rough Rhymes . 

228 



CHAPTER XIII 

DOING IT TOGETHER 


" Striving together for the faith of the gospel .”—Philippians i. 27. 


" Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her ... in 
order to have the Church as His very own, standing before Him 
in all her glory, with never a spot or wrinkle or any such flaw, 
but consecrated and unblemished .”—Ephesians v. 25-27 (Moffatt’s 
version). 

" Adaptability to new environment is the law of life, and any 
institution that tries to remain stationary in a moving world is 
doomed.” —J. R. Cohu. 


“ It is the glory of Christianity that we never know what we shall 
discover in it next.”— Sydney Cave. 


“ The only question which we have to ask when the vision of a 
great enterprise rises before us is. Is it the Will of God ? What is 
required of us is that we should yield ourselves gladly to be borne 
forward by the Divine current which moves about us.”— Bishop 
Westcott. 

*' ‘ Thy Will be done ’ has been a wail, instead of a shout of joyful 
expectation .”—Christus Futurus (quoted in Prayers for the City of 
God). 


” Trumpeter, sound for the Great Crusade, 

Sound for the fire of the Red Cross Kings; 

Sound for the passion, the splendour, the pity. 
That swept the world for our Master’s sake. 

Sound till the answering trumpet rings 
Clear from the heights of the Holy City : 

Sound for the Tomb that our lives have betrayed 
O’er ruined shrine and abandoned wall; 
Trumpeter, sound the great recall: 
Trumpeter, rally us, rally us, rally us. 

Sound for the last Crusade 1 ” 

Alfred Noyes. 


CHAPTER XIII 


DOING IT TOGETHER 


r 

f This book has tried to draw a picture of what 
happens when a man seeks to bring the spirit of 

v Christ into his every-day affairs. Before the book 
ends it needs to be said with some plainness that 
there can be no question of any complete and satis¬ 
factory application of Christianity to common life 
until we all set to work and apply it together . A 
single battalion going “ over the top ” and rushing 
ahead, with its flanks in the air, may inspire by its 
example, but it achieves no large or permanent 
gain of new ground; its adventure is magnificent, 
but it is not wary If in our generation, or in any 
generation, substantial victories are to be won for 
the Kingdom of God, they will have to be achieved 
by an advance all along the line, with unity of plan, 
careful co-ordination and co-operation between the 
available forces, and a spirit of mutual trust and 
strong comradeship animating the rank and file of 
all the armies. It is indeed true, as this book has 
tried to show, that there must be something first¬ 
hand about all personal religion ; despite our mutual 
interdependence, no person can conceivably main¬ 
tain or regulate his neighbour’s relations with God. 
Moreover, every Christian is summoned to make his 
231 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


own adventures in Christian living, whatever his 
fellow-Christians may be doing. But true reli¬ 
gion, however personal and adventurous, is never a 
private thing, to be privately used and enjoyed like 
a house or a garden or a motor-car; still less is it a 
complex scheme whereby the fortunate few, who 
manage to learn the rules, make sure of spiritual 
safety while the many fend for themselves as best 
they can. When, knit in vital comradeship, men 
seek God together , He gives Himself to them in a 
way in which no isolated soul can apprehend Him; 
and the rich potentialities of His Kingdom on earth 
will only be explored when men in groups and 
communities apply its whole programme to their 
common life. 

That His followers should be thus linked to one 
another in a living tether was an essential part of 
Christ’s plan. There was no question of their 
forming a society to unite in propagating His ideals; 
in virtue of their common life derived from Him 
they found themselves to be one body, members 
one of another, a spiritual family with loyalties and 
obligations more stringent than those of any blood 
relationships or other earthly associations. The 
significance of this discovery was quickly and clearly 
recognized by the “ Church,” as it soon came to be 
called, of primitive times ; indeed it was one of the 
greatest things in the experience of the early Chris¬ 
tian community. It was necessary to coin a new 
name for this new thing, and they called it “ the 
fellowship ”: 1 it was “ a community of spirit 

1 Cf. Acts ii. 42, tt) KOLV(t)via (note the significance of the definite 
article). 


232 


DOING IT TOGETHER 


issuing in community of life.” And in the strength 
of this divine fellowship, with a sublime certainty 
that the invisible Christ was literally leading them, 
and with absolute confidence in one another, they 
made an impression on, and wrought a change in, 
the world of their day, in a fashion which has never 
been paralleled since. 


II 

It is proverbial that each generation in turn likes 
to picture itself as standing on the very watershed of 
history. But we who have lived through the Great 
War, and have witnessed the process of world up¬ 
heaval which has continued, with ever-accelerating 
pace, before and during and since that cataclysm, 
have some ground for thinking that we have reached 
a real crisis in the affairs of men. And those of us 
who believe in Jesus Christ are, we contend, justi¬ 
fied in our view that Christianity is the only hope 
of the future, and that organized religion is con¬ 
fronted to-day by an opportunity to “ apply Chris¬ 
tianity,” which is one of the greatest in all history 
and which may not recur. But all depends, humanly 
speaking, on Christians and the Christian Churches 
“ doing it together.” ... As to the greatness of 
the opportunity, there are many evidences that, 
behind and beneath contemporary materialism 
(flourishing in practice while discredited as a philo¬ 
sophy), there exists an unsatisfied spiritual hunger 
in all sorts of people and among very different 
sections of the community. The vogue of spiritual¬ 
ism, theosophy and Christian Science is, on one side 
233 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 

of it, a symptom of men’s groping after something 
that may make life more satisfying and put them 
in contact with its hidden realities. For many men 
and women the Great War meant a moral and 
spiritual earthquake; “ the fountains of the great 
deep have been opened,” and no more can they live 
contentedly on the surface of life. “ All the signs 
of the times,” writes F. R. Barry in a striking 
pamphlet , 1 “ seem to indicate that a far-reaching 
spiritual renewal, on a scale perhaps unknown before, 
is being prepared in the hearts of the people now. 
There is a widespread disillusionment with crude 
material satisfaction. There is a pathetic longing 
for release in the crowds that walk our streets. 
There is a hunger to find some * way out ’—some 
new start which will lift us out of ourselves into new 
fellowship and justice. The sense of failure which 
haunts this generation cries aloud for the knowledge 
of some power by which we can rise above our limita¬ 
tions and escape the predestined wheel of our own 
past.” I am not one of those who believe that our 
generation is more irreligious than its predecessors; 
indeed there is considerable evidence that it is less 
so. Moreover, the war, besides driving a great 
ploughshare through men’s mental subsoil, opened 
up entirely unsuspected reservoirs of moral capacity. 
The nation as a whole, and millions of its individual 
members, have shown themselves capable of a very 
wonderful standard of selfless service and sacrifice. 
The daily, hourly self-giving of men in the trenches, 

1 One Clear Call (Heffer, 9 d). This brilliantly written little 
book goes to the root of the matter, and should be read by all 
who long to see the Church fulfil its true vocation. 

234 


DOING IT TOGETHER 


cheerful and quite unself-conscious, was a thing 
which made an abiding impression on those who 
saw it. Yet not ten per cent, of these men realized 
that in that experience they were touching some¬ 
thing that lies at the heart of Christianity. However 
little, as yet, they may have been impressed by 
organized religion, none can say that the people of 
these islands are incapable of answering a call when 
they hear it, of responding to an ideal when they 
see it. If and when, at last, they are able, through 
whatsoever means, to catch the authentic notes of 
Christ’s own voice, to see in Him the fulfiller of 
their desires, the one hope of a new and better world, 
there may well come a human landslide towards the 
Kingdom of God. 

And yet, this giving of Christ to the world, this 
application of His inexhaustible resources to the 
infinite variety of human need—it is just this task 
which official Christianity seems too paralyzed to 
perform with any adequacy. What is wrong? 
Thank God for the growing numbers in the Churches 
who are determined to find the answer to this query. 
For it is clear that there is something seriously 
wrong. I would not indeed for a moment minimize 
the magnificent work which the Church has done 
and is doing. What the nation has of religious 
sense and moral standard may well be due, in large 
measure, to long centuries of quiet, patient work by 
the Church’s pastors and to the continuous leavening 
influence of many of her devoted members. But 
when that has been said, it still remains broadly true 
that many men and women of our day are fumbling 
after Christ, with a dim hope that He will cure their 
235 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


ills and right their wrongs, and yet somehow or other 
they fail to find Him in the Churches. They feel, 
and not, it must be confessed, without some reason, 
that there is some indefinable discrepancy between 
that fresh and vital thing which Jesus brought men 
at the first and the modern, official institution which 
functions under the Christian name, between the 
Christ of Galilee and the creeds which tame and 
tabulate all He stood for, between His first adven¬ 
turous followers and their mild successors of to¬ 
day, whose chief religious activity seems to be to 
sit in pews on Sundays. The rigid traditions from 
an obscure and ancient past, the crystallized con¬ 
ventions of ecclesiastical thought and language, the 
prayers and liturgies irrelevant to modern life, the 
flood of talk and the tiny trickle of deeds, the oddi¬ 
ties, the inconsistencies, the aloofness of Church 
officials and often of Church members—all these 
things conspire to create in the mind of the on¬ 
looker, even of the sympathetic onlooker, that what 
is mostly wrong with the Church is a grave want of 
reality . As H. R. L. Sheppard has said recently, 
in a characteristic utterance, many of these onlookers 
“ find our brave assertions and poor achievements 
irreconcilable. ... We appear to them like Alpine 
climbers who, after boasting of the height they 
were about to scale, take their ice-axe, rope and 
other equipment, and are discovered later proceed¬ 
ing cautiously up Ludgate Hill .” 1 “ Religion,” 

complains a serious student of modern history, “ is 
imprisoned by its professional keepers. And this 
has become as true of the Protestant Churches, which 
1 The Challenge , New Series, September 29, 1922. 

236 


DOING IT TOGETHER 


owe their origin to a great movement of spiritual 
liberation, of protest, not merely against the abuses, 
but against the fact itself of religious organization, 
as of their Catholic and Orthodox colleagues. The 
hardening of Catholicism into a system where, for 
all the beauty of its ritual and the majesty of its 
traditional appeal, for all the spacious liberty allowed 
in non-essentials, the believer is committed to the 
surrender of his spiritual freedom and initiative, 
is a problem and a spectacle with which European 
minds have been familiar for many centuries. But 
the similar hardening of the Protestant Churches, 
who can neither claim so imposing an ancestry nor 
rival Rome in its outward graces, is a fact of the last 
few generations; and it is due to the stealthy pres¬ 
sure of material cares, to the silently growing power 
of organization and system, to the predominance 
of the Marthas over the Maries.” 1 

Within the last few days the Archbishop of York 
has courageously and publicly declared where, in his 
judgment, the heart of the present problem of 
religion lies. “ Men want a true religion as never 
before—that is its hope. They do not find it in 
the Church—that is its trouble. While religion 
attracts, the Church repels. ... To many men and 
women to-day, especially the younger ones, the 
Church is not a witness to the truth of its Gospel, 
but it is, in its divisions, its dullness, its unreality, 
an obstacle, a stone of stumbling, an offence.” 2 

1 A. E. Zimmern, Europe in Convalescence , p. 66. 

2 A Sermon at the Sheffield Church Congress, October io, 1922. 


237 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


III 

It is easy, and fashionable, to abuse the Church. 
Organized religion offers a target which the poorest 
shot can hardly miss. That there are serious defects 
and failures cannot well be denied ; and I am one of 
those who think these defects should be squarely 
faced. But criticism which is merely destructive, 
and which proceeds very often from those who 
appear to have little or no understanding of religious 
issues and who never do a hand’s turn to help to set 
things right, serves no useful purpose whatever. 
And I should be sorry indeed, believing in the 
Church as I do, if any remarks in this book should 
appear to have that negative character. I would 
rather try to set forth something positive and con¬ 
structive. Granted that the Church has failed to 
keep touch with a good deal of contemporary life, 
and has lost some of the weight of moral authority 
and the keenness of spiritual challenge which have 
been, and still should be, hers, where lies the way of 
recovery ? I have named this chapter “ Doing It 
Together.” What precisely is it that we, as a fellow¬ 
ship of Christians, are called upon to “ do together ?” 
What are the characteristic functions which, as a 
Church , we are summoned to perform, and perform 
effectively ? 

To these questions there is, so many of us are 
convinced, a perfectly plain, though possibly un¬ 
palatable, answer. The first thing, and the main 
thing, is to get our values right. The “ ecclesias¬ 
tical values,” which at present tend to monopolize 
238 


DOING IT TOGETHER 


the field, must be ousted from their pride of place, 
and the “ Gospel values ” reinstated in their stead. 
We need a far truer sense of proportion as between 
the claims of the Church and those of the Kingdom 
of God. The change will be drastic, and will not be 
effected without effort and pain. Axe in hand we 
have to hew our way through the entangling thicket 
of minor preoccupations till once more we see, and 
are free to respond to, the great eternal verities of 
the Gospel of Christ. “ We must recover the un¬ 
edited truth as it flames forth on the world in 
Christ Jesus.” 1 This fatal inability to distinguish 
between the essential and the unessential is just 
one of those things which produce the sense of 
unreality already referred to, and which fill with 
despair many both inside and outside the Church. 
On the day on which these lines are written there 
appears , 2 a promos of the Sheffield Church Congress, 
a leader in The Times which is symptomatic of a 
great mass of puzzled though not unsympathetic lay 
opinion on Church matters. The article, speaking 
both of those outside the Church and of many on 
its fringe who have a real desire for closer fellowship 
with it, points out that “ their position is not made 
any easier when they observe that so much emphasis 
is placed on questions of secondary importance by 
those who are regarded as the most representative 
exponents of the Church’s doctrine and practice. 
They desire instruction on the vital, dynamic facts 
of the Gospel, and too often they look for it in 
vain.” 

Let me illustrate what I mean in urging that our 
1 F. R. Barry, op. cit. 2 October 19, 1922. 


239 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 

first care must be to get our “ values ” right. Take 
such large and (for Churchmen) important matters 
as creeds and credal tests of orthodoxy, the meaning 
of sacraments, terms of Reunion, relations of Church 
and State, Prayer-book revision, and other ques¬ 
tions of reform such as increase of the Episcopate, 
alterations in our systems of finance and of patron¬ 
age, further powers for Parochial Church Councils, 
and so on. All of us who are Church people, and 
especially Anglicans, are aware that these matters 
are of urgent importance, and supremely affect the 
fitness of the Church to do its work. Are we 
equally conscious that, however important, they are 
after all only means to an end , that the Church itself 
is only a means to an end, and that if the bulk of 
Church people allow their thought and time and 
energies to be swamped by the “ means,” the “ End ” 
will retreat further and further into the dim dis¬ 
tance ? It is as if an engine-driver should spend all 
his time making his engine fit to go, and so allow 
it to fail to do the very thing for which it was built, 
namely, to haul a heavy train to its appointed 
destination. This perpetual preoccupation with 
the machinery itself, this turning inwards of religious 
aspiration and religious devotion, this obliviousness 
of the soul-hungry world outside the door—this is 
the essence of the self-centred institutionalism which 
gnaws the vitality of organized religion. The 
Church, God’s Church, Christ’s Fellowship of 
redeemed women and men, was not called into 
existence for this ; it is not in the world for the 
purpose of providing interesting activities for its 
officials and a secure and congenial spiritual home 
240 


DOING IT TOGETHER 


for its membersy The Church was born, and lives 
to-day, that it'rnight act in the world of man as 
the body of the living Christ, expressing His mind, 
doing His work, carrying out His plans; its whole 
business and function is to absorb His thought and 
compassion and power and bring them to bear on 
all the complex range of human living—racial, inter¬ 
national, industrial, personal; to apply, in a thou¬ 
sand different ways, the healing of the Love of God 
to the open sores of our distracted world. One of 
the greatest sins, according to the teaching of Jesus, 
is religious selfishness. It corrupted the organized 
religion of His day; and there is serious danger lest 
it corrupt ours also. He was at pains to make men 
see that the Church can only gain its life by losing 
it. Has not the time come for the Church to go 
back to Him and learn that lesson again ? 1 


IV 

What, it may be asked, will such readjustment of 
values involve in practice ? What would be the 
“ note ” of a Church that was truly “ Christo¬ 
centric ” ? Such a Church would be characterized 
by at least two marked features. On the one hand 

1 For a further treatment of this subject the writer may be 
permitted to refer to his pamphlet, What Is The Church For ? 
published by the Life and Liberty Movement, 117 Victoria Street, 
S.W.l. He would add, for the information of any who care to 
know, that the Life and Liberty Movement exists not only to 
press for needed reforms in the Church’s system, but also to pro¬ 
vide a rallying-point for all who long to see the Church put “ first 
things first ” and serve the world with new vitality and power. 

R 241 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


it would be a society of men and women completely 
and adventurously committed to living, and by 
God’s available grace empowered to live, by Christ’s 
law of love in all the dusty traffic of common affairs. 
Such Church members would, naturally, share the 
Church’s faith, with access to the Church’s source 
of life; but, in their Church membership, the em¬ 
phasis would lie on the practical reality of their 
44 every-day religion,” and the chief test of their 
orthodoxy would be a Christ-like life and a Christ- 
like spirit. No longer would it be possible to regard 
as orthodox Christians those who, however “ religi¬ 
ous ” on Sundays, during the rest of the week show 
themselves mean, dishonest, selfish, grasping and 
unsociable. 44 The demands we make as conditions 
of discipleship are just not those which Christ 
Himself demanded. He asked no man for intel¬ 
lectual orthodoxy; what He claimed was a sincere 
desire for truth and uncompromising moral loyalty. 
He did not ask for a faith about faith; He asked 
men to have faith in Him—to trust Him. Our 
tendency is to reverse His order. As doctrine has 
been piled high on doctrine, and explanation upon 
explanation, the stark, world-overturning simplicity 
of the original Gospel has been hidden.” 1 

For the first great function of the Church is, 
surely, to act in the world as an 44 extension of the 
Incarnation ” ; to exhibit through the lives of her 
members the very beauty of Christ and the character 
of God ; and to use her immense spiritual resources 
for this main purpose. If men cannot see in the 
Church of their day an actual demonstration of what 
1 F. R. Barry, op. cit. p. n. 

242 


DOING IT TOGETHER 


Christianity is and can achieve for human character 
and human life, then the Church is missing the 
first point of her existence. It may be added that 
such a tremendous joint adventure in Christian 
living would create, as a by-product, that glowing 
fellowship, the lack of which makes unity and 
Reunion seem as idle dreams—real unity “ will never 
be achieved by inertia, but only by action and 
passion.” And, further, it would solve our problems 
of worship; such a corporate life would naturally 
find its expression in a public worship which would 
be real and beautiful, wholly sincere and entirely 
relevant to life. Worship often is, and always will 
be, unreal and irrelevant unless it is an expression 
and an offering of a corporate Christianity lived out 
in the outside world; the true significance of each 
Holy Communion is missed unless it is regarded as 
the receiving of God’s life for the doing of God’s 
work, the bread eaten being veritably “ the ration- 
head of God’s army,” and the wine drunk “ the 
stirrup-cup of God’s saints.” 

The other fundamental task which confronts the 
Church in every age is that of sharing its life with 
the vast multitudes of the spiritually destitute. It 
is a common question, in these days of pressing inter¬ 
national, social, and industrial problems, to ask 
“ what the Churches are doing ” ; what contribu¬ 
tions they have to offer for the solving of all these 
thorny difficulties. It cannot be stated too often 
or too emphatically that the Church’s most effective 
contribution to the removal of present discontents 
is to go on making Christians : to bring God to the 
godless, life and peace and hope to those who are 
243 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 

dead in trespasses and sins; with a restless love to 
go on searching for the Father’s lost sons and bring 
them home again, with joy, into His Kingdom. 
This is indeed “ the primary business of the Church, 
without which the rest avails nothing ”; and the 
gravest question for the Church to-day is not any 
matter of ecclesiastical polity, however urgent it 
may seem, but the question whether or no she is 
at last going to throw her main energies into the 
supremely vital task of evangelism. The scope and 
the call are world-wide. What the Church has of 
God is owing to those who need Him, whoever and 
wherever they are—profiteers or penniless, baronets 
or bus-men, from London to Pekin, from the Baltic 
to the islands of the Pacific . 1 From time to time 
in her long history, the Church has caught a fresh 
vision of this her primary duty and has girded her¬ 
self anew to its discharge, with beneficent and 
abiding results. Is not such a return to her funda¬ 
mental business due now ? Let us be quite clear 
about it: if we isolate our religious life, if we fail 
in a Christ-like compassion towards the un¬ 
shepherded multitudes, if we seek to have Christ 
without them , we shall, ultimately, lose Him. He 
refuses to stay unless His friends may come in too. 

“ He said, ‘ Thou must shelter all things if thou shelter Me 
to-night. * 

Quickly came the pulse of footsteps tracing down their only friend, 
In there trooped those other outcasts, blank-eyed, shiv’ring, 
without end; 


1 Owing to considerations of space this chapter makes no 
attempt to deal with the Overseas part of the evangelistic 
enterprise. 


244 



DOING IT TOGETHER 


These I welcomed, but when after flocks of preening fools came in 
Decked in shows, vain, cruel, shallow, I had barred their strident 
din 

From the hearth where Christ was sitting with the mourners and 
the poor, 

But He said, ‘ Those be most needy, those least loved, set wide 
the door.’ 991 

At the present moment there are thousands inside 
the Church who barely give a thought to those out¬ 
side, and simply do not want to be bothered with 
them ; the “ indifference ” which is always asserted 
to be largely responsible for blocking the Kingdom’s 
advance, is at least as characteristic of “ Chris¬ 
tians ” in their attitude to non-Christians as it is 
of the latter towards the religion which Christians 
represent. There are, at last, signs of a change 
coming. From what I have myself seen, I would 
boldly assert that there is a growing number of 
Church members who are becoming keenly conscious 
of their supreme spiritual obligations. But, sup¬ 
posing that we are at length, by the grace of God, 
beginning to “ want ” those outside, how are we to 
set about winning them ? How can we present 
Christianity to them in compelling and effective 
fashion ? 

To attempt to answer adequately such a question 
in the course of a page or two is an impossible task; 
only a few bare suggestions can be briefly indicated. 
Let it be said, first of all, with emphasis, that what¬ 
ever methods of propagating Christianity may be 
conceived or attempted, they are one and all doomed 
to failure unless they are backed, in the lives of the 
propagators, by Christian character and Christian 

1 Morning Mist . 

H5 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


conduct that bear some real resemblance to the 
character and conduct of Christ Himself. This is 
true both of individual Christian witness and of the 
organized efforts of Christian groups or Churches. 
The Church will never persuade the world to “ try 
Christianity ” until the world can see the Church 
gripped, permeated, dominated by the Gospel which 
it advocates; in the last resort life tells far more 
than argument. In the early days of Christianity 
it was the fellowship, the happy brotherhood, the 
radiant corporate life of the then Church that won 
the non-Christian. And it is futile for us to think 
we can win men if this spirit is absent. In the 
Church to-day it is easier to find an earnest preacher 
of the Gospel than a Church or congregation exhibit¬ 
ing a glowing, vigorous fellowship life such as arrests 
and attracts and converts. “ Most of the younger 
generation,” says one who has unique opportunities 
of judging, “ are outside the Churches not because 
they don’t care, but because the Christian organiza¬ 
tions are not Christian enough to meet their need.” 
And there are those inside the Churches who feel 
this lack of fellowship even more acutely. Many 
will echo a remark made to me recently: “ A 
corporate life one must have; for apart from others 
I cannot really bear witness to Christ at all.” 

Secondly, we must resolutely hew down any 
barriers erected, from our side, by officialism, pro¬ 
fessionalism, aloofness and general want of human 
sympathy and human understanding. Many of 
those who are at present untouched by religion 
will continue to regard us with suspicion until, 
without a hint of patronage or condescension, we 
246 


DOING IT TOGETHER 


can frankly and sincerely mix with them as ordinary 
fellow human beings. In this non-human aloofness, 
which makes religion such an unlovely thing, we 
parsons are the worst offenders, though there are 
not a few of the pious and respectable laity who run 
us pretty close. The picture of a parson in the 
mind’s eye of the robust pagan is usually “ the 
unpropitious spectacle of a mild-mannered gentle¬ 
man intent on rendering a group of docile people 
still more docile.” He—the pagan—even thinks, 
often with just cause, that we wear a special face 
to match our drab clothes and drab religion. I 
heard recently a story of a minister who had to go 
by train to some place to fulfil a preaching engage¬ 
ment. His host went to meet him at the station; 
but, missing him, accosted a stranger. “ Excuse 
me,” he asked, “ but are you a clergyman ? ” 
“ Oh no,” replied the stranger, eyeing him sadly, 
“ it’s my indigestion makes me look like this.” 

A third condition of any effective evangelism is 
that our presentation of the Gospel should be both 
intelligent and intelligible. We need to see very 
clearly what it is that we are pressing upon our 
contemporaries, and what precisely we are asking 
them to do. We are proposing to them, not to 
repeat a formula or adopt a point of view or join 
an organization, but to share a life ; and of that 
life we must ourselves be very clear as to its sources, 
nature and implications, if we are to make it intel¬ 
ligible to and available for our generation. It is 
not enough to proffer to them, without variation 
or adequate explanation, descriptions and defini¬ 
tions of the Christian faith as the Church has always 
247 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


held it, however familiar and precious such formulae 
may be to ourselves. It is vital to recognize the 
real distinction between truth itself and the verbal 
vehicles in which, at any given time, men attempt 
to convey it. To attach to particular words and 
phrases a dread and final sanctity is to begin a 
descent into the dreary region of shibboleths and 
cant and magic. Jesus not only left nothing in 
writing, He even seemed to avoid giving His dis¬ 
ciples final verbal statements which they might 
erect into formulae. He gave them not words but 
Himself; His legacy to men of all time was a Spirit 
and a Life. So, if we would win men, we cannot 
evade the task of trying to see afresh for ourselves, 
and so for them, what it really means to speak of 
faith in God, of a life in Christ, of a divine Spirit- 
given, Spirit-guided fellowship linking men together 
into a unity transcending all the common unities 
of human experience. Such a task will demand of 
us that, open-eyed and unafraid, we put Truth 
before dogma ; that, ceasing to regard our creeds as 
shelters to hide in, we venture forth to bring faith 
and life, yea, Christ Himself, to the testing of the 
keenest contemporary thought and experience . 1 

No other course is possible for those who have 
learnt that Truth is living, not dead, is present and 
future as well as past, and who, consequently, refuse 
to “ turn life into a scheme of orthodoxy.” The 
new knowledge of science, of history, is penetrating 
everywhere, and the day has come for the Church 
to disentangle from her essential message what 
Dean Inge calls the “ indigestible slabs of obsolete 
1 Cf. Chapter XI. 

248 


DOING IT TOGETHER 


science ” which have been imbedded in it from 
time immemorial. So far as the Church of England 
is concerned, it is a matter for thankfulness to all 
who put truth before dogma and tradition that 
the Convocations of both Canterbury and York 
have recently 1 boldly affirmed the Church’s free¬ 
dom, and her duty, to investigate, and re-investigate, 
the fundamentals of her faith. 

It is, in any case, growingly clear that there can 
never be any successful evangelism without such 
sincere attempts to relate intelligibly the main con¬ 
tents of the Christian message to the living needs of 
to-day. There is no question of a “ new Gospel ” ; 
but, like the householder which bringeth forth out 
of his treasure things new and old, an evangelizing 
Church must needs ascertain, and make available, 
those essential elements in Christianity which are 
specially calculated to meet the needs of the world 
of its day; above all, we would proffer to men not 
a museum religion, dissected, analyzed, defined and 
dead, but a living Jesus Christ, who has a thousand 
fresh ways of relating Himself to succeeding genera¬ 
tions. We would persuade men to look to Christ 
—Christ living, dying, risen—to see what God is 
like, what men may be, how evil may be overthrown, 
whence history began and towards what it is moving. 
We would go to men with Christ’s glorious tidings 
of a God who is alive and near, free to act and 

1 Summer 1922. Compare the statement of one of the Com¬ 
mittees of the 1920 Lambeth Conference : “ We have to state, 
and to state in terms which are real and convincing to the mind 
of our time, the fundamental truths of the Christian Revelation.— 
Report, p. 118. 

249 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


ready to respond, not remote and aloof and negli¬ 
gible; of a forgiveness real and immediate, of a 
new standard for human living and a power to 
attain it, of a new world fellowship of love and 
peace, of the Kingdom of God as the final reality, 
the summum bonum , the attainable goal, for this 
life and the life to come. 

Now all this involves far more than an evangel¬ 
istic individualism which seeks to snatch a few 
from a doomed world, as brands from the burning. 
It means we may go to men with tidings of redemp¬ 
tion not simply for their own souls, but for their 
whole environment—their bodies and the physical 
conditions of their lives—their circle of relation¬ 
ships, their work, their play, their civic and political 
interests, the nearer and the larger world in which 
they live. With such a message, put intelligibly, 
sympathetically, and with a combination of humility 
and certainty, we can at least get a hearing from 
our contemporaries. There is a way into the heart 
and mind of every generation; and the way into 
the heart of ours is to show that there is that in 
our religion which can successfully grapple with 
social evils and point to the true way of social 
renewal. Men give some heed to Christ when they 
begin to see that His message insists on the absolute 
sacredness of human personality and the binding 
obligation of the law of love, and that He can 
actually enable men to act on these principles; 
and they will pay more attention to the Church 
when they see her trying to think out the kind of 
social and industrial order which these postulates 
demand, and inculcating upon her members the 
250 


DOING IT TOGETHER 


duty of living accordingly. 1 And, in point of fact, 
this Gospel “ works.” When men really discover 
that Christ is not a sort of cold ecclesiastical lay 
figure invented by the Churches, but is, in fact, 
alive and personally accessible, and is actually con¬ 
cerned with their hopes and fears, their work, their 
house, their family, their town and their nation, 
then they, many of them, turn Christian. Some 
of the more recent evangelistic campaigns, such as 
the “ Crusades ” at Woolwich and elsewhere, the 
student “ Campaigns ” at Hamilton, Liverpool, 
and Northampton, and the great simultaneous 
Mission at Ipswich in October 1921, where the 
message has been proclaimed with the utmost 
frankness, on some such lines as those suggested 
above, and where there has been a considered and 
successful attempt to make an effective impact on 
the community as well as to convert individuals,— 
these experiments have given a striking indication 
of what may be achieved when, with all its strength, 
and without reserve, with knowledge and en¬ 
thusiasm and burning hope, the Church proclaims 
Jesus to the people of this land. 


“ Behold, I make all things new.” Such renewal, 
on a large scale, may be nearer than we think. 
There is a cloud like a man’s hand on the horizon, 
with the promise of abundance of rain. The 
reservoirs of God are opening, and whithersoever 
the River cometh there is a springing of fresh life; 
Let us gird ourselves to dig the channels. With a 

1 Cf. Chapter III. 

251 


EVERY-DAY RELIGION 


new faith in God, with deep penitence for the past 
and high resolve for the future, the Church, 
renewed and re-united, may yet be the bringer of 
Christ to this stricken world. But not without 
tremendous cost. It is no light thing to reassert 
the supremacy of Jesus. It will mean daring and 
humility and adventure and sacrifice, and what 
the world would probably call failure; for, as an 
acute thinker has pointed out, always and every¬ 
where “ the Church tends to be controlled by the 
established and the practical; and to these the 
spirit of Jesus cannot be congenial.” 1 And on 
every individual Christian this adventure will 
make a great demand. It will mean, as this book 
has tried to show, a life in every detail—family, 
business, money, pleasure, all personal relationships, 
all hopes and ambitions—ordered with direct 
reference to what Jesus Christ wants. It will 
mean also—and this will be the inspiration for our 
new way of living—a real experience of the com¬ 
panionship of Jesus, of friendship with the living 
God. If we can do it—you and I and all who care ; 
if all who are looking for the Kingdom can get 
together and act together on the basis of “ Christ 
first, whatever it may cost ”—then things will 
happen. We who are Christians may yet do for 
our generation what it so desperately needs. The 
Church—converted, purified, renewed—may yet 
be God’s channel for the rising tide of spiritual 
life which is beginning to flow. And, despite the 
disillusionments and disappointments of current 
history, it may yet be that some of us now alive 
1 Glover, Jesus in the Experience of Men , p. 168. 

252 


DOING IT TOGETHER 


will not taste of death until we see the Kingdom of 
God come with power. 


Grant that we may walk as Jesus walked; grant 
that what the Spirit was in Him, such He may 
also be in us ; grant that our lives may be re-fashioned 
after the pattern of His Life; grant that we may 
do to-day, here, on earth, what Jesus would have 
done, and in the way He would have done it. 
Amen. 


THE END 


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